Earthquake Spices Peary Blazed Hot Sauce Review

Earthquake Spices Peary Blazed

I saw this, of course, as I do so very many things in this here blog, on the hallowed shelves of one of the Burn Your Tongue location and I was intrigued, for here was a sauce that utilized pears, that delectable fruit with one of the more delicate of flavors. Part of the mystery for me was how they were going to retain any sense of pear flavor amidst the usual heavy flavor hitters that tend to get roped in when making a hot sauce. I almost never see pears get used in hot sauces and that aspect is probably a large part of the reason why. Also, the name was kind of weird, in that I couldn’t quite fathom what it was meant to mean. Blazed sort of makes sense in the context of piquancy, given the idea of hot peppers, though we only go Fresno and Habanero here, so the heat is definitely quite moderate, but the peary part...it’s just off-kilter enough to stick in the mind, I think. 

Anyway, as far as the sauce goes, the pear gets pretty thoroughly knocked about here, as one might expect. There are grace notes of it here and there, but it was never going to really stand up well against vinegars and salts and garlic and lime juice and those aforementioned peppers. What did wind up happening here is a sort of balancing act, wherein there is a hint, thanks largely to the cinnamon, towards a dessert sauce, such as a lovely pear tart or perhaps apple pie, but it never quite gets near enough to being sweet enough for that. It is a very nice amalgamation of various flavors, hints, and suggestions, but is very much its own thing.

The consistency is definitely closer to applesauce and the color is more like a darker version of that, a very appealing lightish brown with flecks of red in it, presumably the Fresno. Like most other fruit-based sweet hots, its flexibility is a bit low, but given that there is such a fragile harmony in the flavor notes, this is best suited to those things where you would either want (or wouldn’t mind) some subtle dessert nods. I found it very nice on chicken tendies and imagine it would work wonderfully on some nice pork chops, but didn’t love it on pizza. Part of my thought with this sauce was on the quinoa things that I regularly keep on hand and eat and the fruitiness of this does quite marvelous there as well.

Bottom line: Very mild-mannered sauce that does a nifty tightrope act of balancing several different flavor directions, all while being consistently delicious.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 5