Mythical Meats Griffin’s Claw Hot Sauce Review

Mythical Meats Griffin’s Claw 

Note: It was pointed out to me, for which I'm grateful, in the Mythical Meats Unicorn Magic review, that the MM website points this as relabels of Torchbearer sauces. I kind of figured that was maybe the case, that they were not producing it, not that Torchbearer specifically was, but seeing that makes a lot more sense. This particular one is the Torchbearer Honey Badger, which I reviewed here: https://d-dubtsaaf.blogspot.com/2022/12/torchbearer-honey-badger-honey-mustard.html nearly 3 years ago. This also raises the question of whether I should just leave that link and call it a review, but I think, for now, I will just leave both up as perhaps expanding on the original review.

What we have here is another mustard that is called a hot sauce. It has a lot of mustard components, along with various sweeteners and then Scorpion, Reaper, and Cayenne powders, along with a heavy dose of both black pepper and garlic. So, while I will be rating it as a hot sauce, it functions nearly exclusively as a mustard. 

Aha, I hear you perhaps think to yourself, but what kind of mustard? Well...it definitely has the color of a sweet mustard and no fewer than 3 separate sweeteners, but because there is such a preponderance of bitter ingredients, it winds up in this weird halfway limbo, where it’s not quite a regular yellow mustard, but also nowhere near sweet enough to be an actual sweet mustard. This inadvertently causes it to have a foot in both worlds, but servicing neither particularly. Perhaps considering it a rather punchy vaguely sweet yellow mustard with heavy doses of garlic bits and black pepper is the way to think of it.

I do enjoy the flavor somewhat. It does tend towards the bitter a lot, which can get distracting, and I really don’t particularly like the grainy mouth feel much. I think they should have definitely either gone all the way towards one or the other, either a regular mustard or if they wanted to make it a sweet one, hit the sugars a lot harder...and also not used granulated garlic, when they were seemingly already using garlic powder. Garlic doesn’t really show up as a flavor, though, as it is pulled down by the other stronger flavor notes.

So, usage-wise, it does mostly acceptably as a yellow mustard. Heat-wise, with the Reaper and Scorpion powders in there, there can be a good bit of punch and it does seem to build slightly. My guess is that it will push non-chileheads slightly, if they have a bunch of it and I will say that I think it was a neat trick getting this much heat while retaining as much flavor as they do.

Bottom line: I’d put this as perhaps a somewhat hotter mustard, maybe towards the upper middle of the pack, but as a hot sauce, definitely it fails on multiple fronts...mostly because it is not one.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 3
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 3