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