Knee Deep Blends Tropical Storm Hot Sauce Review

Knee Deep Blends Tropical Storm Pineapple Habanero

Yet another sauce from the hallowed shelves of BYT of another sauce company I didn’t know existed until I saw it there...which also describes a great many sauces here in these annals. This one, with some nifty, though kind of pushing the bounds of legibility for these old eyes, graphics on the labels, is a product I think is ultimately labeled incorrectly. As has been stated repeatedly, I like a little sweet with my hot and sweet-hots, particularly fruit-based sweet hots, will always have my interest. In the trip whereupon I picked this up, I also picked up at least a half dozen more of just that type.

I think this one sort of pushes the line of where does a hot sauce end and where does a different category begin. It is a very, very watery sauce, heavily sweet and looking at the ingredients, with the first two being cane sugar and canned pineapple in light syrup, it’s not difficult to understand why. Habanero is the very last ingredient and only appears here in powder form, so it does not play heavily into the flavor and is there mainly for what scant heat there is. There is also some soy sauce and vinegar in there, presumably to cut the sweetness a touch, along with some citric acid, but even with heavy agitation, that is a hard task to bear.

This one reads more as either a mixer component, as in making mixed drinks, a sort of elixir, perhaps or, better yet, as a marinade. It is so very loose and watery that it requires quite regular agitation and tends to spill off of everything it is put on, as well as running down the threads at the top of the bottle, as this does not come with restrictor cap. In many ways, it’s almost like this is still in development rather than a refined and tested product, but perhaps this is what they want and are just marketing it as something other than what it is. It will, of course, eventually soak into the breading on fried foods, but not quickly, and as hopeful as I was for this on pizza, that was pretty much a nonstarter. Finding the good niche pointed me in the two directions I mentioned where I think it works best and not especially too much else. Heat-wise, as it is Habanero powder and dead last on the ingredient list, as mentioned, this is a pretty tame sauce overall.

Bottom line: While the consistency is the main issue for me here, in terms of actually using it, I did find this a bit sweeter than I liked, with overall pretty minimal heat. 

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 6
           Flexibility: 3
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 4