Hellfire Detroit Habanero
Note: This sauce appears on Season 9 of The Hot Ones.
Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Ass6Mr0is
I find a lot of intrigue around this, not so much the sauce, which is a fairly straightforward and uncomplicated affair, but rather other non-sauce elements. In a way, I suppose this is perhaps unfair, as it moves the discussion away from the actual sauce, but the overall discussion into the final product that hits the shelves is inherently related. So, I'm going to spend some time with the peripherals and confine it to this paragraph and the next, so you can more readily skip ahead to the actual sauce if you don't care about any of this. I put this one off towards the end and probably would have passed it by entirely, were I not trying to do coverage for as many of the Hot Ones sauces as I can.
I guess I'll put it about as bluntly as I can and just say I truly don't understand what this company is trying to do with their sauces. We have these squat bottles with the narrow openings, which is fine, but they are 4 oz. instead of the normal 5. Again, that's fine as you need some what to differentiate yourself in an incredibly competitive playing arena, however, I have not seen this sauce (or any of their others) for less than $18 (I will note it is $15 on their website, but does not include shipping), which is not only 2X many of the other sauces in the 5 oz. bottles, but comes down to $4.50/oz. I don't usually spend a lot of time on pricing, since certain recipes can be more expensive than others, but of these ingredients, 4 of them (vinegar, water, salt, olive oil) are not remotely expensive. Habaneros generally not not, either, so is fire the big overhead driver here? With those 5 ingredients, what we essentially have here is a very expensive puree. There is also the discussion of why they chose Hellfire for their name, when a much longer running and more well-known hot sauce company was already using it, but that won't be one I have here.
As far as flavor notes, it is as basic as you can get, more or less a fire-roasted Habanero puree. I suspect these are orange Habs, but there may be some green in there as well. I don't know if they're going to a mash or not, but the vinegar, salt, water, and olive oil are unobtrusive.Vinegar does show up, but much more as a grace note. The hole in the bottle is a bit on the smaller side for something this chunky. It doesn't so much as pour as fall out in somewhat gritty chunks, leaving no doubt that you're getting a lot of fire-roasted Habs.
I have no problem with that part. I'm not the hugest fan of Habaneros and definitely and rather intensely strongly feel that fire-roasting is the best way to have them. My custom-blend Mexican-style sauce, for instance, used the wonderful Irazu Fire-Roasted Habanero & Garlic (reviewed elsewhere here) sauce heavily and I've done a few other sauces utilizing that ingredient. So I'm not unfamiliar in the least, but unless you really like (probably orange) Habaneros, this one-note sauce will be kind of a miss.Those others I mentioned took more of a stab at creating a sauce, whereas this is more or less, as mentioned, just a puree. It's fine for that, but I found that it worked better when there were other, stronger flavors to meld with. On its face, this one lives and dies by how much you like the main ingredient.
I had to cut testing a touch short on this one, as one winds up using a lot of it, trying to find a feel for where it works best. It's relatively inoffensive, minus all the grit, but I didn't enjoy the flavor of this, particularly, when it became the main focus. The testing used up a lot of sauce, but it doesn't really take that long to get the feel for what this is. Habanero as the main flavor note, for me, works best on Mexican-style food and not at all well in other settings. Heat-wise, I'd put this on the lower side of the range on the label. I didn't find it especially hot, but heat can vary pretty widely from batch yield, so others may be slightly hotter.
Bottom line: Even if you love fire-roasted Habanero puree, it's hard to recommend this for that category, given the expense. Indeed, I would put this one more for those who want to cover sauces on the Hot Ones show and leave it at that.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 3
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1
Overall: 2
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