Angry Goat Yellow Flamingo Hot Sauce Review

Angry Goat Yellow Flamingo

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QfstLwIZvc

This is another fascinating creation from Angry Goat and also marks the first time I've had a sauce with banana in it. Usually, I steer fairly clear from those sauces, as I am not a banana fan, particularly. Here though, it is pretty far from the focus, despite the naming convention of a more mythical creature on the front, which I presume is intended to reference the yellow fruit contained in the ingredients. Instead, we have  a very curious entry that straddles the line between actual hot sauce and dessert sauce, while fitting entirely into neither. 

The sauce starts off with mangos, the flavor of which gets lost nearly immediately. It does make a good base for the orange Habs and carrots that also make their way into the proceedings. Of those flavors, the Habs are the more dominant one, but they are tempered considerably by the apple juice and cinnamon, which meld with the carrots and bananas to give the effect of a carrot cake or banana bread aspect. Cinnamon, despite being dead last on the ingredient list, shows up fairly prominently in the flavor profile, but, again, in the context of those confections I just mentioned. You could also make a case for perhaps a cinnamon apple coffee cake or zucchini bread or somesuch.

However, the taste of hot sauce, of vinegar and peppers and salt, still rears up fairly prominently when actually used on things like apple pie or the suggested ice cream. Hot sauce and ice cream are rarely a good mix and in this case, the application diminished that considerably. So, I tried the other tact and went towards more hot sauce applications. I did quite a bit of testing on this and found it solid on things like chicken strips, but a bit on the funkier side for stuff like pizza and beer battered (also suggested by the label) fish, for instance. It is by no means a bad sauce and is quite intricate and flavorful, but the things it reminded me of, maybe a holiday fruit cake aspect as well, in addition to those other more bready type delectables I mentioned earlier, was where I found it worked best. 

Heat-wise, it is fairly moderate, with the peppers being the Habanero and Jalapeno. It is definitely not intended on being a scorcher. I'm not clear on where they meant it, other than another wildly inventive sauce, which it surely is. At times, you can pick out apple, banana, and a bit of carrot flavoring, all dusted with cinnamon and tinged with Habanero, creeping in there, which makes it a rather nice winter holiday season sauce, I think...

Bottom line: Very novel sauce that doesn't have enough of an anchor for most people, I'd suspect, which might make it more of a novelty sauce, but still a fairly fascinating fruit-based sweet hot.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 5