Karma Cosmic Disco
Note: This sauce appears on Season 19 of the Hot Ones.
Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLeyfqnJfzw
This is a sauce that was a pretty big question mark to me going in. Karma is a sauce company that makes stuff I sometimes like, but overall has proven too streaky to move into my list of favorite makers (you can find that list in the SOTY link to the right). I greatly admire that the company is formed by an ex-NASA scientist and I find the many variations on a theme with much of their hot sauce line to be an interesting idea. However, a lot of their sauces just don't resonate with me.
There are two (I guess you could say three, depending on if you count Scorpion Disco as its own sauce or a revved up version of Funken Hot, both reviewed elsewhere here) main sauces at play here, the aforementioned in parenthetical Scorpion Disco and the Cosmic Dumpling, with me finding to my surprise that I liked the former (and the other former in the parenthesis above) and not really having too much interest in or need for what was essentially a very boutique and perhaps even gourmet pot sticker sauce, as I never eat those. I didn't love the Cosmic Dumpling and it took me quite a while to go through the bottle, so I didn't know what to expect going in. Would it be Scorpion Disco-lite or an actual true homogenization of a hot sauce with strong Asian flavors?
To my dismay, what I found I would describe more as a clash of worlds. The smell and color are definitely more towards the Cosmic end of things and because of that, the initial taste is more in that direction before we get into flavor cancellation and the hammer floral bitter notes of the Scorpion come screaming in. This sauce reads to me a lot more of Scorpion peppers than does the Scorpion Disco, somehow, and that is among my least favorite superhots. The listing is for a "superhot blend" rather than specifically, but while I think this is probably the upper range of heat for normies, this won't give too many chileheads much of a challenge in terms of heat.
The other part of this is flexibility, or more specifically, the lack thereof. Do I use this as a predominantly Asian sauce, for a food type I don't really ever have and even if I did, am not sure I'd want those harsh floral notes there, or do I use it more where I would Scorpion Disco and just potentially have a confusing mouthful of flavors, depending on what gets cancelled out on a given food? I did opt more for the second of those options, a lot more where I used the Scorpion Disco and I can't say I loved any of the results too much. I get a lot of Asian spices there that come through as jarring and honestly have not really found any place, as I write this, where I think the sauce fits well. This may be one that comes down to whether it is good on wings or not, as I keep the Hot Ones show sauces for my quarterly Wing Thing videos on the FOH video series on Youtube and I may play around with it a bit on some Asian stuff, but the union between this sauce and my palate seems a rather unhappy one, ultimately.
Bottom line: This is another Hot Ones and Karma sauce that I struggle with, sad to say. It may have an application where it works wonderfully, but I have yet to discover what that may be.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 3
Flexibility: 1
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2
Overall: 2
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