Black-Eyed Susan Cannonball Crush Hot Sauce Review

Black-Eyed Susan Captain Clyde’s Cannonball Crush

Rather lengthy title for this one, which I find a touch curious, as, nautical/pirate theme aside, I’m not sure what the actual cannonball is. I’d imagine it’s the garlic, which is by far the most forward and dominant flavor here, although the label text alludes to “citrus,” of which there is only orange and only from a juice concentrate and only really present in grace notes that show up here and there. The avocado oil also adds a lot of smoothness and silkiness to things, a bit reminiscent, even to the color, of some of the Torchbearer stuff. It is definitely not as generally chunky and clotty as those products tend to be, though.

This one does glide pretty considerably, in a sort of medium thick way. The oil also helps to suspend things a bit, though agitation certainly doesn’t hurt anything. It also doesn’t really change things a whole bunch, though. The Ghosties are here mainly to provide heat, though I can’t say it is quite a lot of it. This is a relatively tame sauces as far as that goes.

This sauce is really dependent on how much you like garlic and how much what you want to use it on will accommodate an influx of a fairly rich very garlic-forward sauce. I think it would be interesting to mix into a pesto or another sauce where you might want a bit of both a heat and garlic punch and once it warms up, I plan to tinker with it on the grill towards some garlic burgers. It does work very nicely in a garlic bread application, though admittedly that is a pretty simple application that has a very low bar to succeed. I did try it on tendies and it’s just too much of a garlic punch for me there. You could potentially use it to flavor some nuts and then bake them a bit in the oven or possibly try to carmelize these on some chicken wings, where the garlic really comes to life with the Maillard effect. I do like the flavor overall but I find this one somewhat hard to use out of the bottle.

Bottom line: This is much less a hot sauce and much more a straightforward creamy garlic sauce, with occasional slight citrus notes. 

 Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 5
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 3