Earthquake Spices Death By Garlic Hot Sauce Review

Earthquake Death By Garlic

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect when I picked this up. I glanced briefly at the ingredient list, noted the Fresnos and Worcestershire, along with the black garlic, but still paused. I hadn't exactly been bowled over by the previous sauces from this company and was considering putting them on a bit of a pause for a year or two, to try again at some later point. You can read the other two reviews on this blog. With makers I'm not familiar with, it works on a sort of sliding scale. Depending on how much I like whatever sauce(s) I'm introduced to them with, I might try to buy the entire lineup of other flavors as well. This works on the other side as well, where if I intensely dislike a sauce, I might write the company off entirely. But there is also the middle ground, the gray area in the center, which was kind of where Earthquake fell after the first two sauces. 

The sauce was, by no means, surefire. The Fresnos are always a strong ingredient for sauces, but adding Jalapeno and Habanero, while perhaps a touch pedestrian, is probably as close to automatic as one can get in hot sauces. Heat-wise, given those, this is also fairly nominal. I understand there are a couple of other heat level variations of this and I probably will also seek those out at some point. Garlic is something I like but also feel it can become overbearing fairly easily in hot sauces and depending on what type of garlic is used, might put it outside of the realm of positive returns. Naming something "death by [x]," usually means whatever the [x] is in the phrase will result in that being very forward, but here we have black garlic. Black garlic will carry a lovely umami load, but is not intensely garlic-y forward, and it was in the middle of the pack of ingredients, so the naming convention I found a tad confusing. Once I opened the bottle, however, which is what really matters, most of my doubts were dispelled. 

The earlier part of this had a fascinating sweetness that I didn't initially understand. That, combined with the Worcestershire, created a wonderful dynamic, while the mouth feel was largely that of pepper pulp, giving it a nice body, while still retaining a lovely consistency. As I got on in the bottle, it definitely started to predictably lean more towards the Worcestershire, but there was enough contrast that it wasn't restricted entirely to that. As I had initially kind of expected, this was definitely quite umami-heavy, but flexible enough to also work nicely on chicken and a few other cheesy dishes I tried it on. I think it would also do quite wonderfully on non-sweet breakfast foods, but generally, no matter where I put it, I found the experience at least interesting. I wouldn't care to repeat some of them, but none were outright bad. 

Bottom line: This is a delicious, very heavily umami sauce with a confusing name that it doesn't really live up to. If you need a good summer sauce for grilled meats, this is an excellent bet. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 9
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 9

Overall: 6