Merf's Fresa Picante Hot Sauce Review

Merf's Fresa Picante

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook or, better yet, head on over to his new online outlet where you can shop the widest selection available anywhere, www.burnyourtongueonline.com.

 

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS3xintXCzw

I thought I had done one of the sauces from this company before, but could not locate it in my database or on this blog, so I'm probably confusing it with something else that may have a similar label. If this is my first dance with Merf's, they are an intriguing partner. Here we have a meshing of strawberries, jalapenos, and monkfruit sweetener, that should go together nicely, and do, for the most part, but with some twists. This is a quite pleasant sauce when you can experience it fully, but therein lies the problem, a bit.

I wasn't sure what to expect, because the sauce tends a bit more towards the red-orange of a normal hot sauce, but leading off with strawberries immediately brought to mind strawberry preserves. When done right, they're great, but I find most of the commercial ones tend to the overly sweet for me. Here, we have an oddly muted effect, possibly as a result of using the monkfruit rather than regular sugar. The red jalapenos add some interesting notes here, and a slight amount of trace heat, but once the thought of "what if they were fire-roasted," once stuck in my head, refused to come unstuck, as I think that would add an interesting note to this. 

Strawberries, unless amplified as you see in things like preserves, tend to be somewhat of a subtle fruit and with this sauce dialing down that flavor a bit, we start to see a cancellation effect with various foods. Most of the time, this resulted in a somewhat unpleasant salty note that I found somewhat distracting, but in the right setting, such as on desserts, pies in particular, at least where you'd want the presence of strawberry, it was a very nice melding of worlds. This is definitely one that is dependent on the right setting, but if you find it, it can be a quite enjoyable and somewhat unique experience.

Bottom line: Interested debut to me of this company, though I find the sauce seems a bit unsure of what it wants to be...too salty to be a dessert sauce per se, yet not quite planting a firm foot as a straightforward hot sauce, either.

Breakdown:

       Heat level: 0
       Flavor: 8
       Flexibility: 3
       Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 4