Spice Trade Outpost Cleric Hot Sauce Review

Spice Trade Outpost Cleric

Note: This sauce was provided by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue for purposes of review. Check him out on Facebook and Instagram. 

This was enticed me with the lure, the siren song of a class of characters from the fantasy world, perhaps best epitomized by D & D tabletop games and novels and later popularized by various video games. That kind of thing will never not have my rapt and immediate attention, but I was a bit disappointed to find this was the only sauce in the line that did not have onions. 

Still, honey, peach, and Habanero should be a pretty good combination, even if cinnamon was also present. It was very much at the end, where it belongs, so I had hopes it would not play too much into the flavor. It is there mostly as a grace note and doesn’t intrude much, so good there. I did notice that there seemed to be a lot of shifting in the sauce, with the heavier bits all towards the bottom, but I don’t get too concerned with that, as stuff settles quite a bit and it’s standard chilehead practice by now to agitate everything...or at least try to agitate everything, before using. 

Once I got the bottle properly agitated and open, I noticed something that had escaped my attention when picking up the bottle...it was during a haul and as usual, I had several sauces in the basket, but this is a very thin, even watery along the lines of a Louisiana-style Cayenne sauce.  As with other sauces I’ve done over time in this blog, this raised the immediate issue of flexibility being notably altered, as well as flavor density. Using cinnamon already changed that equation, as it also has to be paired, but when a sauce is this runny, it does cut down where, when, and how much can be used. In my estimation, this sauce suffers a bit for this and I would rather it been reduced down somewhat...and also had the cinnamon removed entirely.     

The flavor here is pretty nice, all told, though I found it worked best, on chicken tendies, as it is quite vinegar forward as well. I didn’t mind it on grilled pork chops, but the thinness really worked against it here. The breading of the tendies does a nice job of melding with the sauce and the notes of cinnamon. I kept wishing I could get more of the peaches, but this is more along the lines of vinegar, cinnamon, honey and Habanero, with a very slight grace note here and there of peaches. The thinness definitely does not help here. As it is Habanero for heat, this is a fairly mild sauce, all told. 

Bottom line: A very curious approach to a fruit-based sweet hot that I’m not sure I found overly favorable. I did like it more than not, but the consistency did it no favors.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 3