Puckerbutt Payton's Hot Strawberry Hot Sauce

Puckerbutt Payton's Hot Strawberry

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZv_kjhxD7Y

Of note, this is my 500th overall hot sauce review on this blog, if you count the mini-reviews, which I most assuredly do. The irony of me doing a product that challenges the idea of what actually constitutes a hot sauce I find somewhat entertaining, but definitely is something unplanned.

So, what we have here is a very thin, as in nearly watery thin, sort of sauce wherein the attempt was to capture the idea of fresh strawberries from the field, so these are picked, washed, and kicked into a sauce, all on the same day, something I find very cool. In that mission, at minimum, they succeeded, as this tastes very vibrantly of fresh in-season strawberries, ripened on the vine.The sauce is simplistic with the only ingredients being vinegar, strawberries, and peppers. The peppers are non-specified, but the helpful folks at Puckerbutt thought they were likely to be either red Jalapenos and/or Cayenne, which sort of fit my expectations as well, as the heat here is quite low.

Most strawberry sauces opt to add in a bit of pectin and try to condense things down into a concentrated flavor, more like a syrup or very loose preserves you might put on an ice cream, as far as consistency. Part of that is because strawberries can be a quite subtle fruit, with a not particularly bold or dominating flavor. Here, Ed Currie has rather daringly left it in a very runny state, with the end result, for me, being that I found it slightly watery. The flavor, though, is fantastic, what there is of it. 

The looser the sauce, the harder I find it is to use it and with this one quite runny, it precludes things where you'd need a sauce to stick. I think it would make an interesting burger marinade, given how well burgers work with berries, but the best application I found for it was using it straight as a salad dressing, ala a vinaigrette, where the consistency works for it rather than against it. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that they re-think this one and bring it to market as more of a chilehead salad dressing, as we don't seem to have many of those and there's a natural alignment with this sauce. As a hot sauce, I find it fails for me a bit, despite me really liking the flavor, and that mostly comes down to the consistency issue...and maybe a bit with the low heat as well.

Bottom line: While this is delicious, you will need to be prepared to be creative in using it, if you get this one, unless you're getting it just to be a fantastic salad dressing. 

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 0
           Flavor: 9
           Flexibility: 2
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 4