Puckerbutt Chocolate Plague
Note: This sauce appeared on Season 9 of The Hot Ones.
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=GlvUHY7XdRk
...and lo, verily, did he doth spake that there be a pestilence upon them-
Ah, you're here. Given that's now spooky season, Halloween, at all, just doing a bit of practice, which brings us to the sauce for this review. This one features the Chocolate Bhutlah, which I almost never come across in sauces and what is a cross between the vaunted Ghostie (bhut jolokia) and the Douglah, itself another pepper I almost never come across in sauces. The heat is said to rival that of the mighty Reaper and unquestionably, it's a superhot and the heat immediate, the proverbial mouthful of blast furnace. At the heat level here, though I think there are hotter sauces in the 9 slot, this is very clearly a sauce for chileheads only.
There is a bit of a problem abound, though, and for someone who doesn't generally like sour hot sauces, which is well-documented in these very annals, I sure seem to be running across a lot of them this year. This sauce is easily one of the most sour of them all. Now, perhaps due to my unfamiliarity with the pepper, I have trouble determining if this is normal for the pepper or intentional, but the ingredients are mainly pepper mash and pepper powder, so I'm presuming that this is a good indication of the pepper itself. When I can get those moments where it reads as less sour, I do find the flavor of this pepper favorable, but those moments are somewhat scant and scarce. Most of what I've read on the pepper seems to indicate something closer to the Ghosties, but, again, I don't come across it enough to be familiar enough to hazard speculation.
Certainly, given how much I love Louisiana-style hot sauce, again well documented in these annals, I'm quite familiar with the astringent flavor of a vinegar forward hot sauce, but this is beyond that. This is actively sour, which is a flavor note I find myself less and less interested in as a grow older, a facet which would surely surprise younger me, who formerly stuffed my pants pockets with unripe green plums and actively sought to find the most sour things I could come across. The problem then comes in as to application, because pairing an intensely blazing and highly sour sauce to foods can be challenging, especially when it often leads to diminishing returns. It seemed acceptable on chicken, if used somewhat sparingly, so as to offset that sour note, but honestly, that's just using it for the sake of using. At this point, we're down to the FOH Wing Thing for Q4 2023 and if it doesn't work a lot better there, this probably is going to be binned.
Bottom line: Maybe it's the bottle or maybe it's the pepper itself, but either way, while this is most certainly scorching, it is also one of the sourest sauces I've had...if you're a chilehead and that's your bag, definitely worth looking into this.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 5
Flavor: 2
Flexibility: 2
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2
Overall: 3
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