Jersey Barnfire Sweet & Spicy Thai Chili Sauce Review

Jersey Barnfire Sweet & Spicy Thai Chili

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook or, better yet, head on over to his new online outlet where you can shop the widest selection available anywhere, www.burnyourtongueonline.com.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH9_MR02w9g

I struggled a bit with whether or not to do a written review for this, given the whole "hot sauce only" nature of the blog, buuuuut, even unspecified directly, the intent is clearly a hot sauce. Chili sauces in general are hot sauces and there have been a number that have also utilized pepper sauce. So, a little line-blurring comes with the territory, but things that are overtly not hot sauces, such as mustards and unrelated condiments, unless those are specified as meant by the company to enter the hot sauce space (often without regard to whether they actually belong there), those are excluded.

Anyway, as to this one, Jersey Barnfire is going to wind up on my favorite sauce makers list, if they're not careful and they keep churning out gems like this. Thai Chili sauce and Asian spicy condiments in general were things that were one of the major delights of my chilehead odyssey and it was to my endless delight when I discovered they were also rather readily available in Asian markets, assuming you're in a market large enough for one of those. It seems a lot of Asian restaurants, particularly Thai restaurants, often have a house version of this style of sauce and it is a time-honored and very classic flavoring system, which also extends beyond just Asian food, in terms of flexibility. Indeed, this style of sauce, as I recall, had something to do with Huy Fong and his wonderful variation of sriracha, which one could argue took the world by storm.

For this one, the usual suspects, your vinegar, garlic, ginger, and sugar, are all there, but when we get down to the chilis, here, Jersey Barnfire goes for their own spin, a chilehead take on a classic, if you will. Gone are the crushed red cayenne or Jalapeno peppers, perhaps spiked with Thai chiles, and replacing them are superhots, both Moruga Scorpion and 7-Pot Primos, the latter of which I'm happily seeing show up more and more. That they were able to nail the sauce so closely while using superhots is something of a marvel and they have created a sauce that is a delight. It is more orangey than red, which is a bit of a departure, fitting in nicely with the aforementioned departure, but it definitely fits a pretty specific niche for those chileheads who love this style of sauce, but find nearly all of the other ones available commercially wanting in the heat department.

Speaking of that, Primos tend to be another pepper that build over time and while there is a flash of superhot heat from the Scorpions, as this goes on, it burns to a very nice smolder. This isn't burn your mouth off with heat at the expense of flavor, as the flavor is quite comparable to others of this type, just with a much, much punchier nature. The mouth feel is of particular note as this sauce is quite silky, another part of what is an absolute pleasure. 

Bottom line: This may be an infrequently-used style of sauce for chileheads, but also one that is good to keep on hand and it would have hard to find a more tailored version than this.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 7
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 7