Frye Provisions Hot Sauce Review

Frye Provisions

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

So, what we have here is a sauce designed by a chef, a sauce that actually feels and tastes like what you might expect a sauce designed by a chef to feel and taste. This is definitely a quite gourmet sauce, with unusual elements, such as raisins and dates, as well as achiote paste, that last which I don’t think I’ve encountered in a hot sauce before...and probably not dates, either. It is a fascinating experience, delicate, and extraordinarily well-balanced, with various subtleties emerging as you get further into the flavor notes.

The leadoff pepper is Fresno, which is a great choice, as this is one of the tastiest peppers out there, in my book. There is Habanero for heat, but only at the tail end of the ingredients, so heat is clearly not a focus and I don’t imagine too many will find this challenging in that regard. I suspect this sauce will appeal more to people who are foodies before chileheads, such as yours truly.

I think the idea here is an everyday sauce, an idea which holds appeal to a lot of sauce makers. With that type of sauce, there are two main paths that can be taken. While all sauces in that category have to have a good flavor to function, the first path is to make a sauce that is so delicious that one will still enjoy eating a delicious sauce, whether it pairs directly with the food or not. The second is to have a more non-distinct approach, so that it will potentially work with more categories than keying a sauce to one cuisine type. For this sauce, it strikes me that it has foot in both worlds, where it is both delicious and entirely mutable in terms of where it might be good. Indeed, even with extensive testing, while I have found that I prefer other sauces in specific settings, I’ve not found a single instance where I thought it didn’t work at all or was bad. Obviously, with everyday sauces, flexibility has to necessarily be high and I think this sauce succeeds there. It also comes in a 9 fl. oz. bottle, which leaves lots of sauce to play around with.

Bottom line: This is a very refined, even elegant sauce, that has quite a bit to offer and is perhaps the most gourmet hot sauce I’ve had to date. 

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 8
           Flexibility: 8
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 7