Pepper North Red Serrano & Reaper Hot Sauce Review

Pepper North Red Serrano & Reaper

My first (and prior to this, only) experience with Pepper North was another that arose due to a sauce being on The Hot Ones show. It was called Stargazer and is reviewed elsewhere here. I loved the idea, loved the title, as it hearkens back to a great song on one of the best rock albums ever, from one of my favorite bands, Rainbow, at a time when they were fronted by one of the all-time greats Ronnie James Dio, dearly missed still, and under the helm of the maestro Ritchie Blackmore. The sauce itself, however, did not quite live up to all of that majesty and was ok, but kept surprising me by not ever quite being as good as I thought it was or should be.

I saw this on the shelf of BYT one day, it might have been on clearance, memory no longer serves, but the first two words were Red Serrano, a pepper I have grown quite fond of. I still dislike the green Serranos, which are tragically the ones available most of the time in grocery stores, but the reds are simply phenomenal. If there was a great pepper to pair with the Reapers to sort of modify the flavor favorably, it is probably a Fresno, but if there was a slightly less great, but still entirely wonderful pod, it is definitely the red Serrano. There was some nice maple in there to boot, along with some Chipotle powder to round things out and I missed that the label called it a 9/10 Ultra Hot, so I was somewhat excited to see what the mix was here.

When I opened the bottle, it was blazing Reaper superhot bitter and not much else, which mystified me considerably. It was then that I looked at the label and ingredients and observed what I evidently had not before. So, I socked it away in the fridge door, where it sat for quite a while and I set about experimenting with it. It did nicely in nearly everything I tried it on and as the sauce level in the bottle lowered and I was able to agitate it better, a gorgeous sauce emerged, more in line with the flavor notes I was hoping for. It worked very nicely on nearly everything I put it on, everything from ramen to pizza, from mac & cheese to various meats. I’d even suspect it would do well in both an Asian food and Mexican food setting, making this one of the more flexible sauces I’ve had in a while. 

For all that, there is no getting around the fact that this is very much a superhot sauce and the mighty mighty Reapers are fully activated here. This sauce also does a nice job of building in heat, even though it’s pretty punchy out of the gate. I suspect this will be well beyond where most normies will find enjoyable or probably even tolerable, but I’d anticipate chileheads will find it fairly satisfying, particularly those who are also foodies. It’s good to have a sauce like this around as it packs a quite decent wallop without having to use a whole bunch of it. 

Bottom line: A sauce that bloomed into a surprisingly lovely, impressive sauce, a rare combination of delicious and quite roasty.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 10
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 8