Hellfire Ritual + Hellfire Ritual Habitual
Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do_1M2zG2BI
I thought, for the 400th overall post for this blog, that it might be kind of fun to do a double review and it just so happened that I had come across a bit of an oddity that would work well for this. Earlier in the year, while tinkering around on the Hellfire website (I spend a certain amount of time on hot sauce makers' websites, actively looking for more stuff because there will come a day, I know not when, but there will come a day when I finally have exhausted all the sauces I might want to try but haven't done yet), I came across the Ritual sauce. Given the 7-Pot Primos in it and the sort of fruity-ish nature, I was immediately interested and put it on the list. When I got to the BYT shelves, I picked up a bottle, but lo and behold, once I got home, I discovered Ritual Habitual (shades of Jane's Addiction here?) instead. While I dig the masks on the labels, apparently I wasn't paying the strictest of attention when reaching...but then again, at the time, I wasn't aware there were two distinct sauces, either.
Well, well, a mystery, then? Sauces get renamed often enough for it not to be exactly common, but enough to have been known to happen, which is what I thought. So, I put back on my detective hat and did some digging. Two different sauces, but were they related, somehow? No idea and I couldn't find anything on the naming convention side of things, so I set them aside for a rainy day. A bit later, rain turned to snow by the time I got to them and it was time to dig deeper.
Of the two, the Ritual, the lighter colored of the two, which is also the hotter of the two by a notable degree, is meant to be a Caribbean tropical style sauce. The Habitual I would imagine is probably also in that vein and of the laundry list of ingredients, 16 are shared between them. They are, specifically, distilled vinegar, Mandarin oranges, mangoes, papaya, pineapple, peaches, cane sugar, garlic, light brown sugar, Allspice, vanilla extract, cinnamon, aurry powder, ginger, cloves, and cumin. While Habaneros are in both, they appear as a smoked version for the Habitual, along with Chipotles, as well as bourbon. For the Ritual, it's orange Habs, the 7-Pots I mentioned, and Trinidad Scorpions. Both of them are around the same in terms of being medium thickness with various bits and chunks of the ingredients in the mix.
In terms of flavor, the Ritual is also much better than the other. Given this extremely high spice load, neither sauce likes to really play well with other foods, other than the lighter meats, where they both, as might be expected, excel. I'm posting this around Thanksgiving time, so will be putting both to the test with turkey once that time arrives, but they do well on chicken, fish, and pork. I did try them in a few other settings as well and didn't find the experience wholly enjoyable. Heat-wise, the Ritual also does much better with delivering a satisfying burn, definitely want to keep that one just in the hands and mouths of chileheads, while the Habitual, with a sort of slightly sweeter and much smokier Caribbean flavoring, left me a bit confused as to what the sauce was meant to be doing. It was not particularly hot, but I often found the flavor combination to be jarring rather than something I wanted to keep using, which means the Ritual got used a lot more during testing.
Bottom line: Yet another hot sauce naming mystery, though the Ritual is the clear superior sauce of these two and definitely one of the nicer Caribbean flavored sauces I've come across...the Habitual is more an oddity.
Breakdown:
Ritual
Heat level: 4
Flavor: 8
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8
Overall: 6
Ritual Habitual
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 3
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