Delizie Di Calabria Bomba D’Amore Mini-Review

Delizie Di Calabria Bomba D’Amore

This is not a hot sauce. This is a jar of vegetables marinated in oil. This winds up in a very delicious end result, but it is not a hot sauce, Italian or otherwise. I say this because the label copy insists on calling this both a “hot pepper sauce” and “Italian hot sauce,” but it is not a hot sauce. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to call it a sauce at all. (Of note, as of the time of this review, I see this has been renamed as “Love Bomb” and they are calling it a general condiment, which is correct. This review, then, is for the bottle I actually had.)

We have artichokes (good) and Calabrian peppers (better) and eggplant (less good) and porcini mushrooms (also very definitely good), all in a nice olive oil, with some presumably light splashes of vinegar and salt and so on, but like the usual artichokes suspended in oil, there is no sauce to be had here. Calabrian peppers are certainly tasty and if you made a list of the best-tasting peppers, this would definitely be in the top 2 or 3, but they are not notably hot, per se.

I love the packaging, with the heart-shaped window and the sort of wick on the top of the paper wrapping, sort of like the fuse to those old-timey Warner Brothers cartoon bombs that someone like Bugs Bunny might lob around, but I find the label copy to be odd. I don’t understand the point to calling a thing something it is most definitely not. Things can be just a hot/spicy marinated-in-oil vegetable blend. Giardiniera is absolutely a thing like that, but no one is calling that a sauce. A garnish, sure, maybe even a condiment, but not a sauce and definitely not a hot sauce, even if that can be slightly on the punchy side here and there.

Anyway, this is something they suggest for pasta, pizza, paninis, etc., essentially Italian food, to which I’d agree...provided you can apply some heat directly to it to lessen some of the oily feel a bit. If you’re more a fan of oil, then perhaps you might be inclined to add it after the fact, but not me. Straight from the jar, this is quite good, but I feel it works better with some heat applied to it, to dial down the oily slick feel, and to hopefully get some of the Maillard effect raging. I quite like this and am happy I got it and heartily recommend it, but it is no sauce, let alone a hot sauce and only appears here, grudgingly, as a Mini-Review, and only because the labeling insists on calling it otherwise.