MSRF Don't Be Chicken Hot Sauce Review

MSRF Don't Be Chicken

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xlGUZoLbaY

Usually, I like to peruse the post-Xmas aisles at Wal-Mart because there can be some great deals found, as they generally want to move all of the holiday-related novelty crap out the door in time to reset to the newer holiday-related novelty crap forthcoming. Every year, I inevitably find myself in one of those stores for something or other (in one trip, this most recent one, I found material for three FOH videos, this one being the third of those, so you never know), and I will go wander by to see what they have, regardless of holiday. It's one of the perks and perhaps perils of being a food explorer. 

Anyway, sometimes you can find great deals and sometimes the price will be acceptable to try sets you are not expecting to be great, but wouldn't bother with at full retail and it's just a great load of fun to whip through them, but this year, I happened across a couple that caught my eye and weren't too egregiously priced. One of the them was the, also from MSRF, Beer-Flavored Hot Sauce trio, for which I did a mini-review (elsewhere on this blog) and this, which was an entire bottle of a single sauce and I felt needed the full review treatment.

Oddly, on the website, it lists this as both "Hot" and "Habanero," and the first is definitely not an accurate adjective and the second is at least possible, but also strikes me as extremely unlikely, given neither the flavor nor the heat of that pepper is especially present. While it does not specify the exact pepper on the label, it does call it "Aged Red Peppers," which almost always means Cayenne and flavor-wise, this is more strongly Cayenne than anything else. There is a delicate, lilting hint of garlic, so it's not a straight Louisiana-style Cayenne sauce, but more a Cajun, but the kiss of garlic is so light, it doesn't really play much into things, so, for intents and purposes, I consider it a Cayenne sauce.

It is a very solid representation of the style, all the way down to being mostly vinegar forward, though it also does have a smoothness more representative of something like a Frank's. If anything, this is a better-tasting version of that specific sauce. There is little to no heat to be found here and it works well in all of the usual places you would use a Louisiana-style sauce, from creamier sauce dishes to fried foods, to essentially any food leaning on the more rich side of things. At $5 retail, it's not a great deal, despite coming in a surprisingly higher detail glass/plastic/metal collectible bottle, but if you can find any of this at clearance, where it goes 50% to 70% on those post-Xmas sales, grab as many as you can. I know I will be. 

Bottom line: Very tasty sauce representative of the vinegar-forward Louisiana-style Cayenne, with no real heat to speak of, and a smoothness that makes it notably less abrasive than others in that style.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 7
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 9

Overall: 6