HAB Pineapple Habanero Hot Sauce Review

HAB Pineapple Habanero 

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz, of Burn Your Tongue, esteemed hot sauce emporium. Check him out on Facebook.

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

HAB is a sauce company I only recently came across and I find their approach to labels to be pretty admirable, at least on the artwork side. The name of the company, as one might expect, is derived from the venerable Habanero, which appears, if memory serves, in every one of their sauces. All the fancy artwork in the world plastered on the outside of the bottle is great, but it's what inside that matters, of course.

Here, we have a very solid, very steady approach to the Pineapple-Habanero hot sauce, in which we have a strong lean on the pineapple puree side of things. In addition to making it a touch pulpy, it also requires some degree of agitation or else you'll wind up with I did in the early part of the bottle, which was a fairly heavily intensive lime flavor, which I didn't think worked at all well. Fortunately, the flavors settled in as I got further along in the bottle enough to agitate it and we have a ultimately a pretty nice approach.

With only the Habanero, this won't be burning anyone's face to cinders, but the combination of garlic with the pineapple and the soft heat of the Habanero sets this one apart a bit. The salt is used quite effectively and judiciously as well and for this style of sauce, this probably borders on about the best it is ever going to be. Now, for my preference, I would have preferred a bit more sweet to the pineapple and I wish it was a tad less loose, but those are minor quibbles. In every application I would normally enjoy this kind of sauce, it was pretty wonderful and one advantage to using that sort of puree style is that it will work extremely well with grilled meats, up to and including burgers, so nice bonus there.

Bottom line: I got a few, but this is my first introduction to HAB and so far so good. While this sauce isn't a dazzler, what it does very well and if you need an introduction to this style, this is a very good starting point.

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 8
           Flexibility: 8
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 6