Da Kine Hawaiian Hot Mustard
Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_UaAwKeNLU
This is one I picked up last year, same time as the other Da Kine entry (reviewed elsewhere here), thinking it might have been intended as an actual mustard for my grilling season FOH series (playlist on right), but the intent seems to be a hot sauce. Flavor-wise, I totally get what they're trying to do here and it's a pretty smashing idea. To wit, the idea is to basically have a sweet mustard, like a honey mustard, then infused with their Cayenne-based hot sauce. In principle, given that both condiments rely fairly heavily on vinegar, this should come together nicely.
In these reviews, however, I don't base my commentary on intent, but on actuality, what's in those bottles available for sale. My hunch on their intent may be off, but as far as the sauce I've described above, which I seems as catered to me as a sauce could be, this one misses wildly. The problem here is that they just don't take the concept far enough. So, we have the regular sauce, which is fine, and an array of sweeteners, including pineapple juice, brown sugar, and regular sugar, also fine, but there's just not enough of it. The result is not being a good in either category, be it mustard or hot sauce.
So, we get shades of the regular sauce, shades of yellow mustard, notes of black pepper, which is admittedly a nice touch, and a sweetness that comes through in all of that as kind of an oddity. When we think about honey mustards, they tend to be thicker and gloppier, which naturally has something to do with the properties of honey itself. Replacing that as a sweetener with other agents is fine, so long as the appropriate sweetness level is hit. If not, you have what amounts to basically an oddity. What they were going for is that old Reese's commercial, "hey you got your chocolate in my peanut butter, hey you got your peanut butter on my chocolate," and magic is born, but instead the result here is more like sauce puddles that happen to run together on your plate.
That is not to say it tastes bad, per se, or wrong, just more weird. This is a problem because the profile becomes immediately distracting. The expectation here, given all the sweeteners and the name mustard in the name, would be leaning much more heavily towards a honey mustard. This sauce seemingly starts with their original sauce, which was a solid, if unspectacular Louisiana-style Cayenne sauce. With that as the largest component, it naturally is going to skew that way unless there's a heavy hand to right the ship. What we wind up with, then, is a pretty confused sauce, more or less a Cayenne sauce with often conflicting notes of mustard, the aforementioned lovely black pepper, and a sweetness that does not have much depth (another hazard of replacing honey in this style of sauce). Heat-wise, it's quite minimal and goes no further than the original sauce that acts here as what I assume is the base.
Bottom line: I get the impression this conglomeration of flavors is meant to appeal to many, but the danger of that kind of mixing is what we have here...an end result that I don't suspect will appeal much to any.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 1
Flavor: 3
Flexibility: 3
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1
Overall: 2
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