Splintered Lu'au Pohaku Hot Sauce Review

Splintered Lu’au Pohaku

This is, to my memory, the first time I’ve had the combination of Carolina Reaper and pineapple, but it makes sense. We see a lot of Habanero and pineapple as well as Scotch Bonnets and sometimes we may see a Ghostie floating around, but rarely does this type seem to get too far into the superhots, particularly the upper level. I really liked this idea, given that it was possibly a new spin on pineapple sauces. Pineapple is also one of my favorite fruits, so even discounting the onion powder and garlic powder in the ingredient list, I had high hopes.

Those hopes were temporarily dashed into the rocks when I first opened the bottle at room temperature. The sauce had a foul odor and a fairly unpleasant taste and it seemed directly attributed to those aromatics I mentioned. Sauces of this type almost never have those elements and it’s largely because they’re unnecessary. Here, despite being near the end of the ingredient list, they were quite distracting, to the point I was debating whether or not I was going to do a video. For me not to film a video on a sauce, it has to repel me to the extent that under no circumstances do I ever want to taste it again, even for a video. It’s been a while since that’s happened, so for this to be the case, that’s kind of saying something.

But...as is my wont, I threw it in the fridge to see what it was like chilled. Refrigerating sauces can change the flavor complex, sometimes pretty considerably, so I was hopeful the sauce would be more tolerable colder. It was, almost to the letter, as in I found it tolerable rather than something I disliked, but not much more than that. This was a shame, as clearly pineapple is used in the sauce, as it is quite nicely pulpy and thick. The body of this sauce, in fact, was fantastic. There is a decent pineapple flavor, but despite it being the first ingredient, it is trampled under foot by the aromatics. I also did like the combination of the Reapers and Jalapenos and if those two ingredients I mentioned in the first paragraph were simply absent, this would be a far better sauce.

As it stands, I kind of think this is using the flavors that might be utilized to prepare Kalua pig and tossing them into a sauce, given the Lu’au name for the sauce, but they might have just tried to make a different approach for a very saturated segment of the market. I did find it worked to much varying extents, depending on what it was paired with, so I’m happily more able to come to terms with it, but this is ultimately very against my preferences. Despite the Carolina Reaper, which is paired here with the more flavorful Jalapeno, this is overall a quite mild sauce.

Bottom line: If your tastes for this kind of sauce run to more the semi-sweet and you wouldn’t mind some onion and garlic with your pineapple sauce, this is probably worth a shot.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 3