Pisqueya Spicy Sweet Hot Sauce Review

Pisqueya Spicy Sweet

Note: This sauce appears on Season 22 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJC6XiTLN1g

Sometimes coincidences are fascinating. Skip ahead a couple paragraphs if you're not interested so much in story time. Take, for example, the Bravado Manuka Honey Passion Fruit hot sauce (reviewed elsewhere here). I was not familiar with Manuka honey specifically, but figured it was like any other honey and do a lot of FOH content for spicy honeys (there is a playlist to your right, if interested). Honey in hot sauce can often be quite good and while not super-versed in passion fruit, I figured, hey, tropical fruit, should be interesting. It was, but not in a pleasant way. I get into it a lot more in the review and accompanying video, but there was an off-flavor I found extremely off-putting.

So, shortly after I wound up filming, then binning that sauce, I received a spicy Manuka honey product I had ordered before the Bravado sauce arrived. That particular product, which will eventually be posted and in the Spicy Honey playlist I mentioned, did not have a very forceful off-flavor and by then, of course, I was pretty interested in tracking down what was causing that, so I could try to never experience it again. This sauce I picked up solely because it was on The Hot Ones show and only realized later it featured passion fruit. 

So, what we have here seems a lot like an attempt to jump into the very well-established territory of tropical fruit-based sweet-hots. Most of those tend to be either mango or pineapple and this is clearly aimed at that, but for me, it's a pretty hard no-go. For, you see, I have discovered the source of the off-flavor, which was strongly pleasant here. To spare you going back and either re-reading the review or watching the video for the other sauce I mentioned (though I would love it if you did one or both), there is a flavor that comes across as medicine-y. If you're a beer homebrewer who has had an infected batch or if you've otherwise experienced an infected beer, you'll know what I mean and since passion fruit is the first ingredient, it's pretty prominent here.

Interestingly, this sauce does not have vinegar listed, instead relying on both lemon and salt to act more as preservatives (I presume). The notes I dislike seem to wax and wane as I go through the bottle, so I'd definitely suggest a lot of agitation with this one. Unfortunately, I could not really find an application where I liked the flavor, so this is ultimately a miss for me and will probably be binned after the Q1 2024 Wing Thing video. Heat-wise, it is virtually non-existent. This sauce label has the very annoying habit of not specifying the specific peppers (though others in the line-up from this company do), but this does not rise, for me, to even the level of one.

Bottom line: This is one of those I find incompatible with my palate, but if you really like passion fruit, this is probably worth giving a go. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 2
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 0