Hot Winter Original Hot Sauce Review

Hot Winter Original

This is yet another reward for having an open mind, I think, in that the first sauce I had from this company, the Hatch variant (reviewed elsewhere here), I didn’t find particularly impressive. While I didn’t write the company off entirely, I did put them pretty far on the backburner for a time. Once I had the Bulgarian Carrot (also reviewed elsewhere here) from them, it brought them more to the fore and I thought I should probably get the original, since I enjoyed that other sauce so much. This was a quite wise decision, as things turn out.

When sauce makers designate a sauce as “Original” or something along those lines, it suggests a sort of flagship, an initial or perhaps best foot forward sauce, to introduce you to the company. While this maybe doesn’t mean definitively that it is their very best product, in the case of both Hot Winter and Gindo’s, it does serve as an unparalleled flavor platform, a sort of “starting at the top,” if you will, and I can definitely appreciate that all makers are trying to get fans of their product, which will hopefully mean repeat consumers, even perhaps someone who is willing to fly the flag and maybe make some recommendations to other people to similarly give it a go.

Here, we have the Hot Winter pepper, a varietal exclusive to them, as far as I know, that has a fairly moderate heat, but also a very nice sort of sweetness to it. This is one of the more flavorful peppers out there used to make sauce, by my reckoning, and they very wisely do little to alter it. In many ways, speaking generally to the entire line-up, the sauces here read almost as much as purees, being thick and chunky, for the most part. They can tend a tad towards the gritty, with the seeds being left intact, but that slight downturn in flexibility is perhaps more than made up for by the heft and mouth feel. The sauces seem fairly well orchestrated and I suspect this is intentional.

I quite like the flavor of this, but there are a number of places I don’t particularly want grittiness added. While this particular sauce is pretty far from rough, you are going to hit seeds and depending on what you’re pairing with this, it could be a tad jarring. I personally find this wonderful in sub sandwiches and on pizza, which can take the grit a touch better, but on things like mac and cheese or other creamy dish foods, I would prefer it not be there at all. This does particularly well on meats and I think you could put it with just about any of them. Indeed, if this sauce was a tad smoother, it would definitely bump the flexibility higher and we’d be talking about another SOTY candidate, but as it is, it just missed...still a very high water mark and overall, an excellent sauce.

Bottom line: If you’re looking for a flavorful and delicious taste adventure that is fairly moderate in terms of heat, look no further.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 7
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 7