hungryboy The Mexorcist Hot Sauce Review

hungryboy The Mexorcist 

While I will spare you my dissertation, here anyway, on label design and where this one falls in, I will say that I love the name of this sauce, which is a very clever riff on the title of movie The Exorcist. This sauce apparently has a sort of pug as a mascot and on this one, the pooch is dressed up as the preacher from that movie, in a graphic I find greatly entertaining. Of course, these are just incidental things, nice touches, as it were and what really matters it the sauce.

As to that...well, I'm delighted to report that this is one of the better Mexican-style sauces I've ever had. The mouth feel is outstanding, a bit pulpy and on the thicker side, and it overall is quite clever, successfully bridging the gap between green sauces, thanks to the tomatillos, and the usually much richer and heavier red sauces. Visually, it is more towards the latter, but flavor-wise, and in practice, definitely more in the middle of those two, sort of combining the best of both worlds.

In practical use, because it is so wonderfully flavorful, this might even extend a bit beyond Mexican-style foods, but it is there that it absolutely shines. While certain tomatillo sauces I've had in restaurants have been some of my happier flavor experiences ever, I'm no so much a fan of green hot sauces generally. I will enjoy me a good chile verde, for instance, but backing that with a nice potent red sauce is inadvertently creating the idea behind this very concoction here. I think there are definitely times when one might want a green sauce, but for me, that is fairly rare and far between and so having a sauce like this nicely scratches that itch, while also feeling fairly firmly planted on the red side of the sauces.

While I loathe deeply the manner in which they have chosen to display the list on the label, we have a plethora of wonderful ingredients in what seems a pretty thoughtful gourmet sauce. We have roasted garlic, Guajillos, Arbol, and red Habanero mash, along with the usual plethora of the usual suspect in this style of cumin. There is also black pepper, which I don't always see in these styles of sauces and which is a wonderful addition. Same with the smoked paprika, which adds a nice and delicate grace note to things. Heat-wise, given the red Habaneros, which are pretty far back, this is fairly moderate for heat, but what is there is a pleasant warm charge.

Bottom line: I'd never heard of this company and only came across it during one of my occasional World Market checks, but I'm well-pleased I did. It's hard to come across unique approaches in such a well-established and mature sauce type, especially one as delicious as this. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 6