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