Doc's Fusion Fuel Hot Sauce Review

Sauced & Glazed Doc's Fusion Fuel

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZXMqmkyp7k

Sauces like this tend to make me nervous. We have a shiny chrome label and a heavy marketing theme that seems to want to straddle the line as close as possible without getting an actual lawsuit from Universal Pictures over one of their more profitable motion picture franchises. So, we see references to 88 mph, the tag that this sauce was created with 1.21GW of (electrical) power, which is well over a billion watts, and it would need to be a rather large, voluminous kitchen to use that much electricity. The idea of it being fusion fuel I suppose works well enough, as he has a Mr. Fusion on the back of the vehicle to replace a need to chase down lightning bolts, a practice which would be inconsistent at best. There is also the tagline of "Great Scott, it's hot," which is both a direct reference to a phrase from a character in those films played by Christopher Lloyd, and is a statement which is decidedly false. Finally, in addition to all that line-straddling, there is also the flavor of the sauce itself, which hovers perilously close to being a barbeque sauce moreso than a hot sauce.

It is definitely a hot sauce. It does share many ingredients with barbeque sauce and a certain similarity in flavor profile, but the main part that tends to set barbeque sauces apart from hot sauces, even here, is the sugar content. While there is some here, this is not a primarily sweet sauce and tends more, if anything, towards the bitter. The flavor reads much more like a hot sauce, despite a lot of similar ingredients, which makes it a bit on the unfavorable side for the grill. We are dealing with Habaneros, so there isn't a great amount of heat here, though it can build a touch on the back end. The smokiness is a bit on the subtle side when used with food and can get somewhat lost, depending on usage. 

Speaking of that usage, this can fairly readily be used almost exactly as one would a barbeque sauce, so it's great on things like burgers and chicken. As I said, it doesn't have enough sugar content to be my preference on the grill, but you could readily combine it with an actual barbeque sauce to ratchet that up a few notches and have something probably pretty solid. This also is somewhat of a double-edged sword, though, as the sauce works much less well in places where you wouldn't use a barbeque sauce and in those applications, I found this to be a bit jarring. Barbeque sauce is a fairly big, bold, pronounced flavor and for a hot sauce to follow suit, it needs more of a neutral base, such as those foods I mentioned, so as not to compete with the thing you're using it on.

Bottom line: Not quite a novelty sauce, but a rather interesting approach to gain attention by the company, which wouldn't matter if the sauce wasn't good This one is...in the right setting.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 5