JimEmi's Creations The Red Sauce Medium Hot Sauce Review

JimEmi's Creations The Red Sauce Medium

Interesting sort of stylization in the name, with what I presume is the first name of the sauce creators or company owners, capitalized for both and then run together. On their website, this sauce, the only one available, comes available in a coffin package, should you so desire, with a choice of colors, which itself is kind of curious. Most of the mini-coffin packaged products tend to be on the hotter side of the scale, which this is nowhere near, so no idea what they're going for there. The sauce itself is made by Angry Irishman, out of Ohio, though JimEmi's is from CA, which is kind of nice to see the co-packer get some love on the label. 

I'm not sure entirely what they were going for with this sauce, other than to make a sauce that is visually red, which this one is, quite deep, rich, dark almost to brown red. It is fairly thick, but flows pretty smoothly. When I looked at the ingredients, it seemed to me like it would be oriented towards Mexican/Southwest flavors and that is indeed where I found it to be best, thanks to a fairly strong note of cumin in the flavors. I could see this also working possibly in ramen, though I did not attempt it. There are additionally some nice notes of chili powder, tomato and an underlying sweetness from the honey, with the Habanero playing in there mostly as a back current of very slight heat. 

While I found the sauce very accessible and potentially a good gateway sauce, I also found it a bit frustrating, thanks to a personal quirk of wishing sometimes that a given sauce had this or that note to it. For this one, while I would have loved fire-roasted Habs in there, it seemed like there was something missing, a flavor note, and after some pondering, it is smoke. If this had a nice delicate flavor of chipotle in there or, better yet, make it a smoked Habanero or Ghost, the latter if they wanted to bump the heat a bit, that would have been just exquisite. Unfortunately, I've not been able to get this out of my head (fortunately for me, this does not happen with every sauce or anywhere near that often) and now lament the sauce it could have been and I wish it had been. Still, what is here is undeniably delicious and worked fantastically well on all the things I tried it on, which were admittedly limited to that food type I mentioned in the paragraph above. I am not a huge fan of cumin and a little goes a very long way for me. This sauce had a bit too much of that note for me to go too far off adventuring, but when it stays in pocket, food flavor-wise, it's very nice. I'm excited to see what they do next.

Bottom line: Excellent flavoring of ingredients you would generally find in a taco sauce or taco flavoring, tinged with a touch of sweetness and low heat. 

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 8
           Flexibility: 4
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 5