Butterfly Bakery Maple Chocolate Ghost Hot Sauce Review

Butterfly Bakery Maple Chocolate Ghost

Reviews like this are among the most challenging to write. Like other Vermont sauce makers Angry Goat and Silk City, Butterfly Bakery is in my favored nation sauce maker list (see SOTY list at right for link to that page) and like those other two, they are very intent on experimenting and presenting flavors that are quite unique in the world of hot sauce. However, like both of those other two, in doing so, they have created a sauce that has missed a bit with me and it is this one right here.

I refer to these sauces with the phrase “more interesting than good,” and it’s not necessarily a knock, as those words mean distinctly different things. They are not mutually exclusive attributes, by any means, but at the end of the day, not everything is always going to hit. Here, I should be pre-disposed to love this sauce. It has my favorite superhot, the lovely Ghosties, presented front and center and backed by the usual mash accompaniments, but also by maple syrup and cocoa. It is herein that I think the problem lies for me. When you use the word “chocolate,” it implies certain things. The chocolate we generally know is created by melding a sugar, usually a lot of it, cocoa powder, and cocoa butter (or possibly another fat). This sauce seemingly has 2 of those 3 things and of the 2, neither is in great amount, at least not enough to greatly influence the flavor profile in comparison to the Ghosties. Calling this one Maple Cocoa Ghost would have been more reflective of what’s in the bottle. 

Every superhot, Ghosties included, have a facet of frequently being intensely bitter. Cocoa powder by itself is quite bitter, as any of us who tried it as a child thinking it was Nestle Quik powder can attest. So, we have bitter amplified by bitter, which creates somewhat of a feedback loop. This is also one of the thickest sauces I’ve had from anyone not named Torchbearer and so it tends to come out in dollops and the dollops tend to hold in place, especially if the sauce is cold, which further reinforces that attribute. 

This results in some difficulty in finding where this sauce fits and with what. There are some suggestions on the label, but for me, it didn’t work on ice cream, even a heavily sweet one with chocolate flakes in it. This is definitely a sauce that works best if you spread it out more, to let it meld with whatever you’re attempting to use it on. I found it best paired with aged cheeses, salty meats, and fruity cheeses, like a bluberry Stilton. The label suggests using on beans, which I’m taking as refrieds, and I could see that working better as you would have both heat and potentially stirring into something, as well as adding to a brownie batter batch, but I think it will take more playing. As this is not a particularly pleasant sauce by itself, and the thickness I mentioned means you will likely get pockets of the sauce by itself. With Ghosties this far forward, it is also probably best reserved for chileheads only, as I don’t see normies enjoying this overly. This does, however, represent the attributes of Ghosties well, in that it ratchets immediately to as hot as it will get, which for me was somewhat over a 2, and then camps there. Additionally, this is one of those where a little goes quite a way, so the bottle should last quite a while...

Bottom line: While I appreciate that the Ghosties are this forward, I think for me, the tuning on this one would need to be both a thinner sauce, as well as a much sweeter one. It did inspire quite a bit of curiousity in me, however, and I will continue to play around with it...

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 3