Lisa’s Piece O’ Habanero Heaven & Extra Hot Habanero Hot Sauce(s) Review

Lisa’s Piece O’ Habanero Heaven & Extra Hot Habanero

Note: These sauces were provided by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue, hot sauce emporium of legend. Check him out on Facebook & Instagram.

Here we have a couple of sauces that are sort of playing on the heaven (referenced directly) and hell (referenced less overtly) themes, with essentially the same base. I really like this idea, as you can very dynamically see, for example, the concept of moving to a hotter pepper experience, the flavor notes change and tend towards bitter, as the sauce (or pepper) gets hotter. By using the same base, aside from switching out the bell pepper variety used as accompaniment, this illustrated quite effectively and if you’re interested in that, buying this as a part will do well to amplify that.

However, doing so is perhaps slightly unfair to the “devilish” version, that being the Extra Hot, as it suffers in comparison. While it is a fine sauce in its own right, with a solid bit of heat for a Habanero sauce, along with a very nice sweet accompaniment to a Habanero flavor, with grace notes of carrots underlying, the “angelic” version is just really one of those more unique special sauces that come along so very rarely, that the appreciation when they do is instant.

Here we have a sauce where the sugar and carrots create a very nice harmony, with an excellent rounding by the orange bells, all with a very slight undercurrent of heat from the Habanero. I’m not sure if I should call it exquisite or not, but this is just an outstanding creation, easily one of the more flavorful sauces I’ve had this year and among the best ever utilizing carrots. Carrots are one of those odd sauce additions for me, where I get it conceptually, but even as a foodie, I find them much less sweet than I keep hearing portrayed. Here, the emphasis is a bit more on the carrot flavor, but instead of forcing them to also carry the sweetness equation, sugar is added and it winds up being just a delight, particularly with the aforementioned bells. While I will stop short of calling it outright great, I do like this sauce quite a lot.

The Extra Hot moves to yellow bells, which are fine, but as peppers go, the closer one gets to red and red variants (including brown), the more flavorful and sweeter they tend to be. This is clearly meant to be what it is, a much more Habanero forward sauce, and it is definitely that. I’m not a huge fan of the flavor of Habanero, which is well documented in these annals, so while I like what they’ve done here, it definitely pales in comparison to the “heavenly” version. I will say that this one did work better on Mexican food, thanks to that more Habanero forward flavor.

Both of them are sweet enough, though, to qualify essentially as sweet hots generally. The Mexican food experiment was not something I really wanted to repeat, as I found them a touch too sweet, but anywhere you might use a sweet hot, from fried foods to pizza and, given the prominence of carrots, on roasted vegetable or vegetable dishes in general, these will be well at home in. Yes, they’re sweet enough for desserts (but not angled in a way they would be good on ice cream), particularly a nice slice of carrot cake for at least the “heavenly” version.

Bottom line: We have a sauce here that approaches stellar (Piece O’ Habanero Heaven) and one that shows the trade of flavor for heat (Extra Hot Habanero), albeit is still a good sauce in its own right. Think more general sweet hot, as a category, albeit with a very tasty sweet carrot lean, for the former, and with a more pronounced lean for the latter.

Piece O' Habanero Heaven Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 9
           Flexibility: 7
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 7

Extra Hot Habanero Breakdown:

           Heat level: 2
           Flavor: 5
           Flexibility: 5
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 5