Horsetooth Naughty #4 Hot Sauce Review

Horsetooth Naughty #4

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr5ZLVk4rYA

I imagine there's probably a story behind this sauce, coming from yet another sauce company hailing from Colorado. The company itself seems to be named after a mountain range, but if there is a story, it's not where I can find it. The verbiage on the website refers to a pepper you wouldn't bring home to mother, but this has both Scotch Bonnets and Habanero, so I'm not sure which they're meaning. The text goes on to reference the Scotch Bonnet, so I presume that's what they mean. In a literal sense, given that my mother is about as far from a chilehead as one can be, I definitely wouldn't be bring this - or any other pepper with any degree of heat - to her, but when I think of Scotch Bonnets, the lovely flavor rather than any heat is what comes to my mind.

I've mentioned this before, but using mangoes can be a bit of a danger when you're doing a fruit-based sauce, as you can as often get something sour as much as you might that excellent tropical sweetness. That is the case here. This is quite a powerfully sour concoction, to such a degree I would normally not find it especially palatable, but they did an interesting thing here to save it. That is the addition of black pepper, which makes this not only a fascinating sauce, but more of a delectable one. To be sure, the uses of this are fairly limited, as it is overwhelmingly sour, still, so think light meats like fish and chicken and it more or less stops there. It is, however, very nice on those.

There is weirdly a restrictor cap that comes with this, which I suspect is more them trying to push the idea that this sauce is hot (it is decidedly not) than in terms of viscosity, as the sauce is sort of a medium thickness but way too much to easily fit through the hole of a restrictor cap. Possibly they use the same cap for their other sauces and it's all they have, but I wind up removing the cap entirely to use this at all. Heat-wise, this is rather minimal. It's just enough to be called a hot sauce, but not really much more than that.

Bottom line: An interesting flavor dynamic between sour mango and black pepper, with a slightly back end of Scotch Bonnet/Habanero manages to save this sauce, but the novelty is definitely prone to wearing off.

Breakdown:

       Heat level: 1
       Flavor: 4
       Flexibility: 2
       Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3

Overall: 3