Coney Island Saucery Vault-Tec Hot Sauce Review

Coney Island Saucery Vault-Tec Industries

I've had my steely little eyes on this one for a bit, ever since I stumbled across it on Amazon. While I'm a Fallout fan casually, it's not to the extent that I collect that particular media, despite really liking the imagery and motif of everything from Fallout 3 onwards, and this sauce, like other licensed sauces tend to be, was a bit on the expensive side, too much for this poor lad. Then this, and another sauce that will also be in these annals at some point, if not already, depending on when you read this, were part of a set called the Vault-Dwellers pack, which was on sale, and like usual, I needed to throw a little more in the kitty for free freight, so here we are. I'm kind of a sucker for vanity sauces and vanity products generally, so this hit a couple of sweet spots for me. Of the two, I had higher interest in this, given the pineapple nature of things, but when opportunity shows, strike with a high hot iron fist and so on...

Anyway, with this kind of sauce, which I've had plenty of and which always tends to grab my interest, there are a number of approaches one can take. I prefer the more pineapple forward and sweeter ones, but sometimes makers will opt for the sour side. I'm not a fan of sour hot sauces particularly, so this decision is not met particularly approvingly by me most of the time. Part of this has to do with my impression that they're using unripe fruits. As a kid, I loved the sourness of that to a great extent, to the point where I'd hurl my little boy self into gastrointestinal distress, and more than once, I might add, which has given me a healthy respect to enjoy overly sour stuff in moderation and made me a bit gun shy. Where it concerns hot sauce, though, I think it undermines the idea of a condiment where you'd use it to increase your enjoyment of food. So, while we do have a solid amount of pineapple flavor in this quite pulpy and medium-thick sauce, it is compromised by the vinegar and the two additional acids added to this. 

I find this also tends to dial down the flexibility of things. If the sauce runs sweeter, you can use it on burgers or pizza as well as on lighter meats, where this kind of thing really shines, but when it's sour, both of those two options are out. Sour burgers and sour pizzas are not something I will ever really want, nor the omelets the label copy suggests, and while this could potentially serve a function in a cocktail, that's not really something I either indulge in or think of hot sauces towards, particularly. It's fine on fried chicken and that's where I think this works best, but I'd still rather have a different sauce. It's by no means a bad sauce and is quite palatable, despite being on the sour side, and I think this is more just a reflection of where my preferences lie. As far as heat, this is very much on the tame side, as expected, and isn't challenging, probably for anyone.

Bottom line: I know it's a collectible - it even has a glow-in-the-dark label - as much as food product, but this is tad on the pricier side. If you like sour fruit-based hot sauces and/or are into the Fallout universe, this is probably worth a look, but definitely I'd recommend waiting for a sale. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 3 

Char Man Original Hot Sauce Review

Char Man Original

Sauce Of The Year candidates, in any given year, tend to come one of two ways for me. Either they will be ones that I suspect will be in the running or they will come out of nowhere and be total surprises. This one is the latter of those two. It is also yet another that I don't know what the hold up was on me getting to it. I certainly was familiar with Char Man and kept half an eye on them, but a sauce featuring one of my very favorite ways of including pods, which is fire-roasted, and having it front and center in the ingredient list...the lapse is one I cannot account for. I suspect I may have thought it had onions, but don't recall specifically now why the delay. In any case, it is one I am definitely happy to have gotten to. 

If you're a hot sauce company and you want to have a signature sauce, I think it's incumbent upon you to choose something that represents your brand. In this case, we have several markers. We have the fire-roasted, i.e. the "char," and we have a decent amount of heat to it, yet it is ultimately quite approachable in flavor and character, to the point that this could very easily qualify as a table sauce, albeit a much hotter one. The flavor profile strikes me as ubiquitous, in that it doesn't really align to any one thing specifically, presenting a greater overall palette of application. I tried this on quite a number of things, excluding Asian food, where I think it would also work, and while I didn't always love it more than certain favorites, it never failed to deliver on elevating the food, as well as being delicious on its own. This is an extremely well-rounded sauce, exactly what you want when it comes to putting your best foot forward with a signature sauce.

But, it doesn't stop there. The design of this is borderline brilliant. We have the fire-roasted Habs to start things out and you get a good healthy dose of those, then some chili paste to give this some richness, then the combination of garlic and sugar, which works together to a near-dizzying effect, almost to the point where I would say these two should always be paired. Now, I like a good blast of garlic to the facehole just as much as the next swingin' dick, but here, where it dances with the sugar, it's a near work of art and symphony of flavor. This is smart on so many levels, including how visually interesting it is. I quite love the color here, even though it strays from the red that is usually my preference. All of the solid ingredients are represented quite well in any given spoonful and there are bits and pieces of the various components, yet this is all done without it being gritty or having an unpleasant mouthfeel. This is a nice medium-thick chunky sauce, so whatever you use it on, you should probably want that aspect, but the flavor it delivers tends to meld with nearly anything...at least anything savory.

Bottom line: I don't know how one could do this style of sauce better and this represents well what a signature sauce should be...as well as epitomizing, in large portion, what I look for in Sauce Of The Year candidates. 

 Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 10
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 8 

Klowns On Fire! I Scream Klown Hot Sauce Review

 Klowns On Fire! I Scream Klown

I happened upon this one during my most recent BYT haul and figured I'd give it a whack. I've been aware of KOF for some time, but most of their sauces have the no-go onions, so I kept them on the backburner, but I like to cover as many different companies in these annals as possible. I also had not gotten an overtly dessert sauce in some time and it had been a while since I'd had anything resembling spicy chocolate stumble across my radar. 

It took me a bit to get to this, but the first notes out of the gate were a nice heavy dark chocolate. The tone of this changed somewhat as I both got more into the bottle and agitated it more, with the raspberries coming to the fore, but also pushing a slightly cloying sense to them. Overall, I did find this a bit overly sweet for me and most of that is because of the raspberry aspect. This, however, is not necessarily a huge detriment. Let me explain.

Given the presence of the mighty mighty Reapers and the pretty clear intent that this be a topping for ice cream, I suspect the heat presence is driven up a bit accordingly to accommodate. Digging heavily into this on non-ice cream stuff will get a nice building burn that will probably be overly intense for most normies, so a little of this will go a ways. For me, it is more that raspberry that I can't really take in heavy doses, as I don't really have much of a sweet tooth, but as an accent, this is a lovely chilehead dark chocolate syrup. 

Of course, given that you have to pair both chocolate and raspberry, which I do wish was more fresh raspberry than as processed as it comes across here, it may cut down on the dessert things you would like to pair with it, but I tried a number of different dessert sweets and didn't really find any where it didn't work. Obviously, this is not going to go well, nor is it meant to go at all, on regular entree or savory items, but for what it is, I found it to be a pretty solid entry overall.

Bottom line: When I envision a chilehead dessert dark chocolate syrup in my head, this so far has come the closest to what I had in mind, despite being a tad overly sweet.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 5

Dirty Dick's Ghostzilla Hot Sauce Review

Dirty Dick's Ghostzilla Ghost Pepper Sauce

After the other Dirty Dick's sauce I reviewed here, the lovely Caribbean Dream, see TOC link at right, I was suitably impressed enough to look into their entire lineup and saw that this was a newer sauce either on the horizon or already out. So, I immediately added it to my hitlist and kept an eye out while going through the other bottles already waiting patiently on the shelf. When I did finally find it available, I picked up a bottle, not noticing the presence of a couple of ingredients that might otherwise give me pause. The first of these was bananas, the second curry powder, though the first was definitely the one I found more of issue here. I don't usually get sauces with bananas because I'm not a fan of the flavor and thus pairing becomes a challenge.

What I was excited about, beyond the sauce name and using my favorite superhot, was the idea of peaches and pineapple. I also noted the tomatoes, a very underrated ingredient in hot sauces generally, and I thought we might have the makings of something brilliant here, possibly sauce of the year, even. Most of the time when scanning ingredient lists, I am looking for two things. One is the presence of onions or onion-derivatives, which usually presents a pretty hard red line for me. The second is the presence of extract, which I find tends nearly always to ruin or severely diminish the flavor of whatever it's in. Not finding either of those two in this sauce, I didn't look much closer than that, which is how and why I came to be where I found myself here.

The initial read on this sauce when I opened the bottle was a lot heavier on the tomato side and it had an unexpected, but quite pleasant flavor to it. As I got further into the bottle, however, the larger story emerged, which was that you kind of need to like banana a lot more than I do for this sauce to really hit. While this has an overall tropical vibe to it, the bananas are definitely the most present in the notes and the texture is somewhat reminiscent of mashed banana. I also started to notice an aspect of the various peppers, not as in pods, but of the spice variety, such as the black, white, and red peppercorn variety. Those will impart a certain bitterness into foods, as will superhots, which I've noted throughout these annals. Combined, that also came somewhat to the fore. There was a backend of the curry and tomato, which imparts a nice richness, in there as well, drowning out the much more delicate peach and pineapple, which I found unfortunate. Given the Ghosties fairly high in the ingredient list and bolstered by Habaneros leading the ingredient list, this is a fairly punchy sauce and may be on the verge of being too much for non-chileheads.

The problem with bananas, for me, is that I only like them in very specific instances, none of which generally involves hot foods, other than maybe fried bananas. This sauce isn't really sweet enough for that and I don't have them very regularly anyway, but pairing bananas to meats are not things that are connected in my mind. Leaning into the tropical vibe seems the good move here and I thought it worked best with chicken, but I also found the banana flavor to be really jarring and distracting when I got notes of it. Ultimately, despite my earlier excitement, this turned out to be a mixed bag for me and unquestionably, in my mind, this is a worlds better sauce without the bananas...and the curry can also be booted as well. I'd further prefer the peaches and pineapple come before the Ghosties, which would hopefully make this a tad sweeter as well.

Bottom line: This is a sauce where you have to be a chilehead who likes banana flavor to really get the most out of this. I am not and as it currently is, this is more mixed bag for me. 

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 3 

TRUFF Smoky Pineapple Hot Sauce Review

TRUFF Smoky Pineapple

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7kBFesc5tU 

It always strikes me as odd when there is a sauce with the word pineapple in the name that does not also reflect the accompanying flavor in the sauce profile. Pineapple is a fairly distinct, and sometimes polarizing, if certain parties are to be believed, flavor and it's not really something that one can use accidentally. It's not like spooning sugar into tea, "whoops I spilled some pineapple into my lemon tart." You generally have to go out of your way to include it, so it always puzzles me that if you're going to go to that trouble, why the flavor is not featured prominently. I've had other sauces where it is muted, but fairly few where it is absent entirely, but this is yet another in that ignoble list. 

I often find various trendy ingredients to be overrated. Truffle is absolutely one of them and it's another of those "rich cuisine" flavors and things I'm just as happy to be without. I find a little of it goes a long, long way and building a sauce line around the concentrated form of that, while featuring very slick and attractive packaging, is a curious proposition. Obviously, they are well national at this point, so they've managed to attract some backing capital, but the only person I've ever seen either buying or having it at all is me. I will say that the red sauces work better with Italian tomato-saucy foods and I think they floated a pasta sauce line at one point that was smarter, but I struggled to get through the only other flavor I've had from them (reviewed elsewhere here). I will also struggle to get through this one.

This is a much thinner sauce than the others seem to be and I'm not quite sure where they intended to position it. It's not quite as watery as a Louisiana-style, but is a bit closer to that, with the consistency somewhere between that looseness and maybe a medium thick. The flavor profile is heavily vinegar as well, with a sort of vague pepper flavor, maybe the Habanada puree, maybe the TRUFF chile blend, maybe both combined, and, of course, the actual truffle powder as well. Even with Habanada being a much milder variant of the Habanero, there should be a touch of punch, but this has next to no heat in it. What is absent from the flavors I mentioned, of course, is both the smokiness and the pineapple, which is especially curious for the latter of those two ingredients, given that it's the first ingredient in the list. 

This is definitely one that is helped immensely by agitation. When I first opened the bottle, I found it borderline ghastly and there it sat in the refrigerator door shelf while I pondered what could possibly be done with such a concoction. There are suggestions on the label, but I was a tad fearful of ruining those foods should I try to apply this to them. I will probably wind up using this as something to stir into other things, but that's just me trying to invent ways to use it up. Perhaps in that process I will discover somewhere that I like the combination of pungent vinegar with truffle, but this is not something I would ever want as a forward flavor profile nor is it a sauce I will ever get again. It was years between the first TRUFF sauce and this one and I don't know that there will ever be a third. 

Bottom line: If you like the idea of a vinegar-forward sauce, with truffle and a vague pepper flavor base, along with no heat to speak of, this might be up your alley. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 2
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 1