HAB Sauce Thai Peach Hot Sauce Review

HAB Thai Peach

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

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LrDGkWbRe8

Sauces like this are invariably some of the more challenging to review, in that ultimately, I'm ambivalent about it. It's fine, which is about as milquetoast as a thing possible to say, but that is, as they say, bottom line up front (BLUF). The label has armored rhinos on it, which I dig and again will note that their label game is second to none, but I'm not really in the habit of picking up sauces for cool labels. I have kept exactly two hot sauce bottles ever, one because it was in the shape of a rooster and it fit in well with some other glass figurines my mother gave me and the second was the Retsuko Rage.

For this sauce, while I'm glad to see Thai chiles used in a hot sauce, I think there's also a reason they're not frequently seen in hot sauces and that has to do with flavor or rather a lack of it to impart. The heat is quite slight, and for me, these peppers are super application-dependent. Pairing them with peaches could have been a move of brilliance, but garlic is also in the mix. Since that is one of the stronger elements of the ingredients, flavor-wise, this is a very garlic-forward sauce. Peaches are still there, but more as an afternote. If you're going to have a peach sauce, for me, I think it has to be the star and build everything around it. This seems like a stab at an Asian sweet chile sauce, just using peaches for the sugar, and they don't have enough sugar for the task, which creates the imbalance. 

I don't dislike garlic or anything and it may just be my own expectation with a fruit-based sweet hot, but I'm really expecting the fruit to be the first and main flavor, regardless of whatever else is in this. Some makers pull this off flawlessly, on a near-magical level. When it doesn't happen, perhaps this is me being spoiled, but when it's not there, I find myself immediately wishing it was. This sauce is not offensive or anything, it just tends to make me wish I had a different sauce. I think it works best in Asian-y dishes and not particularly well elsewhere, which is perhaps what they were going for. Heat-wise, it is quite minimal, with only Thai chiles being the heat component. 

Bottom line: This is one of those sauces that fill me with ambivalence. It could have been really interesting, but what it is now seems to me to need a bit more re-tooling, specifically less garlic and more sugar/peach flavor.

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 3
           Flexibility: 3
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 2