Adoboloco Fiya Fiya Hot Sauce Review

Adoboloco Fiya! Fiya! 

Note: This sauce appeared on Season 10 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UBvyQWSmes

Much like the Kolohe Kid and Hamajang, both of which have appeared elsewhere in these pages, this one seems to start with a base of Ghost pepper, apple cider vinegar, salt, and garlic. Where this one veers off is the addition of Jalapenos, Habaneros, and Scorpions, the latter of which bring both an increase in heat, as well as a shift in flavor. The base is still somewhat distinguishable, but this one has a large superhot bitter and somewhat floral note to it. This is interestingly a bit low at the beginning, but as one gets further into the sauce, it becomes more pronounced. 

Like the others, this one does not lend itself to any one dish intuitively, at least not to me. So, I hopped myself on over to their website to see if they had any food pairings in mind. I found quite a lot of them, some of which will be in the forthcoming video (watch this space), but the last one, which suggested it as an everyday sauce, I found kind of amusing. If you're a sauce maker and someone wants to know what a given sauce is going to be good on or with and you say everything, I find it a struggle to take that company seriously. There are precious few sauces that are universal enough to be good on every single possible thing you could eat, even if you omit those which will obviously not be good, such as sugary breakfast cereals. 

Anyway, I did quite a lot of testing on this. It's hot enough and more particularly bitter and flowery enough that it could be used sparingly and still get the point quite emphatically across. On chicken strips, I didn't find it hugely enjoyable, nor on pizza. I was quite interesting in mac & cheese, but I found it highly distracting in an Alfredo setting. On rotisserie chicken, I found it kind of a bust. There are a few Korean dishes, as well Hawaiian, suggested. Even nachos, of all things, but I had to draw the line a bit, as I don't generally add anything to the Korean dishes and the previous two sauces I mentioned earlier and found them both a bit wanting. Also, I should add that the recommendations for all 3 sauces seems to be identical, another reason to take those recommends with a grain (or several) of salt.

Even for all of that, I did find this sauce to have more depth than the other two, building on the framework of them nicely. Despite a fairly rough start from the Kolohe Kid, I've liked succeeding sauces progressively better, which is also the case with this as well. Definitely, though, this one packs enough of a wallop that it should be left to chileheads. 

Bottom line: A definite upgrade in heat, and a slightly lesser one in flavor, from the other Adoboloco entries in The Hot Ones pantheon, I find it overall interesting a bit more than compelling, but ultimately solid.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 4
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5

Overall: 5