Crabby Shack Zesty Lemon Pepper Hot Sauce Review

Crabby Shack Zesty Lemon Pepper

Note: This sauce appears on Season 21 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpKH2J1weyE

Ok, so the Crabby Shack is evidently a restaurant in Brooklyn that also happened to produce sauces, at least for a little while. This is one of them. The other, called "Original Hottie," I believe, I can't find anything about and in fact, on their less than stellar website, can't find any info on this one, either. I actually started wondering if they were still in business, but it seems more like they're concentrating on running the restaurant business, rather than trying to do the sauce sideline. All to the good there, even if the website frustrated me a bit, largely because I liked this sauce so much, I wanted to try other stuff from them.

It's not surprising this is a chef-derived sauce. The combination of ingredients is brilliant. Pairing tomatillos with lemon pepper is something I will readily admit I would never have thought of in a million years, but it makes total sense, given that lemon pepper seasoning is quite nice on tomatoes. A little dash of Habanero to make this thing an actual hot sauce, though heat is very low and quite accessible, and it is brilliant, tasty, wonderful...as long as you like lemon pepper, I suppose. I do, as will be obvious, and especially like how well the notes of cracked black pepper come through, which almost always makes me very happy when it comes in a hot sauce. Lemon pepper can sometimes be a tough bitter and abrasive and the tomatillos do a nice job of mellowing that out a bit, while still leaving those strong flavors more or less intact.

Since lemon pepper has been one of my favorite profiles for as long as I can remember (literal decades now), this sauce made me very happy when I first opened the bottle and I had to dial back so as not to tear into the entire damn bottle before I had a chance to try it on wings. To say I love the flavor profile is perhaps an understatement - I'd put it easily in my top 5 favorite sauces from the show - but I will also note it won't fit everywhere. Citrus, for me, is a square block and food would be a star shaped hole, in that analogy. While I do enjoy it dearly, lemon pepper in particular, in the right places, that is pretty far from universal. 

So, for the things that citrus works well on, such as white meats like chicken and, naturally, given that it's from a seafood restaurant, any of the white fishes, crab, lobster, and shrimp. Where it works, it does so at a near-magical level, again assuming you like lemon pepper, but vary outside of where that flavoring system is nice and you get results that make you wish you had saved the sauce for one of those more magical settings.

Bottom line: An absolute wonder of a sauce and something that is borderline transcendental paired with the right foods, with a heat level that is widely accessible. If you like lemon pepper, this is an absolute must.

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 10
           Flexibility: 4
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 6