Captain Mowatt's Luscious Hot Sauce Review

Captain Mowatt’s Luscious

A lot of people will note that I “sure must love hot sauce,” when they find out about the breadth and depth of this here blog and the FOH video series or see how I generally will accompany food in a less public setting. To a degree, this is true, however, if you look at the actual grading curve from last year’s Year End Update, you will see that the skewing is definitely not on the higher side, where one might conceivably expect it. I think part of it is because those people are not privy to my actual mindset, which is that condiments and spices and flavorings are more or less tools and just as you would not generally try to remove a bolt with only a hammer, the sauces are fairly use-specific to me.

A fair number of sauces I find myself feeling somewhat ambivalent about, such as this one. It is essentially a fruit-based sweet hot, with tropical fruit notes being the more forward. The peppers are Fresno, Cayenne, and Bird’s Eye, the first two being wonderfully flavored, but they don’t really show in the flavor as this is much more a pungent sauce. Pineapple, one of the two fruits, does show up a bit in the aftertaste, but it is generally not really specific to that.

For me, there is nothing really wrong with this sauce. It tastes fine, heat is very moderate, and most of the time I don’t get too clanged by the apple cider vinegar, lending its distinctive “tang” to the proceedings here, yet it is also not a sauce that I’m particularly wowed by or find especially favorable or notable. My preference is definitely more towards the sweeter side of things, which is perhaps playing into my detachment here, but the sauce is, for lack of better word, fine. It is a take on the fruit-based sweet hots, but I can’t also say particularly that I think it’s what I would call representative of the style and for those unfamiliar, I’d start elsewhere first.

Bottom line: As much as I hate damning things I review with faint praise, that is unfortunately where this one fits best...it’s there and it’s acceptable as a generally tropical fruity very tame sweet hot.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5

Overall: 4