CaJohn's Raspberry Honey Mustard Hot Sauce Review

CaJohn's Raspberry Honey Mustard

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug0e3qNLJo0

Here we have an entry that raises a few questions. The first of these is should something with no heat be considered, or call itself, a hot sauce? For me, that answer is no. Since the product is marketed and labeled as one, that is, however, how we will be judging it. The hottest we get here is Jalapeno, which raises the second question of why I got it in the first place. For that, I truly do not know. I might have thought it had a different pepper (probably this, actually), but it was a CaJohn's sauce that I knew I hadn't done and that company is one that I've had a soft goal of eventually fully canvassing in these pages. I guess that's it. I truly do not know. I think I thought it was something else and when I was putting it on my hot sauce shelf and taking a closer look, couldn't quite decide where it would fit in, so it sat for a bit. I would not normally get a sauce that didn't go any higher than Jalapeno and for a lot of this blog, the mantra was Habanero or higher...

There is a third question that the sauce itself seems to be asking and that is what if we took the raspberry Chipotle sauce, that Fischer & Wieser claim to be the first and maybe inventors of, and we throw out the Chipotle entirely and instead make it raspberry mustard, with Jalapenos instead. This is a question, of course, that no one was actually asking and the results are predictably that I want there to be a smokey flavor there and keep trying to find it, in vain, of course, as this is not that kind of sauce. I don't really understand the intent but I see a reference to a charcuterie type style of meats, so I guess that.

It does work quite nicely on lighter meats. I found it to be a delight, even amidst me incessantly wishing it had smoke, on things like chicken, turkey, even taking a stab at putting it on a hot dog or subbing it in on cheese and crackers. I wish I had opened it when temperatures were warmer, because I truly think this would make an excellent grill sauce. It is a quite nice tasting sauce, even though, oddly, it comes across as a lot more subtle than expecting. To get a kind of flavor impact, I have to use enough to concentrate it and then it pulls in the raspberry, honey mustard, and yellow mustard aftertaste you would expect with this kind of sauce.

Bottom line: Not what I would call a hot sauce, but an interesting stab at a fruit-based honey mustard that is quite nice in the right applications.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 4