Dirty Dick's Caribbean Dream Hot Sauce Review

Dirty Dick’s Caribbean Dream

So, recently, I went out a’shoppin’ for some mustards that might be calling themselves hot sauces, seeing as how I tore through the last actual mustard I had along those lines, the Maritime Mustard Pickle (reviewed elsewhere here). I was plumb out of mustard, you see, and while I don’t use a lot of it all the time, it is one of those things I like to keep on hand and if I could avoid getting one of the pedestrian national brand ones, I would surely do that. Anyway, after making a short list of lines to go look at, I headed off to the hallowed shelves of BYT once more to see what I could see. This was one of those sauces.

While it did not fit that particular bill, what I found was a highly enjoyable entry into a type it had been a good long while since I’d had last, a more or less true dyed-in-the-wool Caribbean sauce, with mustard, all manner of dried spices and a flotilla of different tropical type fruits and even some non-tropical ones to boot. All of this came together in that weird sort of magical combination only Caribbean sauces (and some dishes) can seem to do and I was certainly not unhappy to make this discovery, though it did nothing for my mustard dilemma.

With that type of cuisine, dried spices in particular play a very prominent role and that is certainly the case here. Like many blackened dishes, there is no side-stepping that dried ingredients are used, but rather than trying to downplay it, here, like in the cuisine style, it is embraced vigorously. For me, it works wonderfully and I have yet to find a meat that I did not find this sauce utterly delicious on. It is, to be sure, a very vibrant flavor, but also a very distinctive one. When I find sauces where that is the case, those also tend to be a lot less flexible, as I think food flavors need to almost come to them, rather than the inverse. So, outside of meats, I’m not entirely sure where this would really work particularly well, but it does touch lightly on some mustard applications to a degree as well, such as sandwiches.

Being that Habanero is the heat source here, this is not a particularly blazing sauce. At its peak, after the build, it was slightly over a 1 for me, but nowhere near enough to get the bump. For the most part, I was left with overall a very nice, solid, slightly robust pleasant mouth blaze once I was done using it. Best of all, this is one of the more moderately priced sauces out there.

Bottom line: If you’re not familiar with either Caribbean style sauce or the flavors, you would do well to get a bottle of this, as it covers an awful lot of ground at once, and deliciously.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 6