hungryboy Sweet Sting Hot Sauce Review

hungryboy Sweet Sting

I was initially not going to include this sauce on the blog, because it has no heat at all, despite a heavy pepper presence, but after going to the manufacturer website, it is in the hot sauce section and they consider it one, so here it shall be. I do not particularly consider it as one, however. 

I'm going to keep this short and *ahem* sweet. Think of essentially a more concentrated soy ginger sauce, with some honey grace notes here and there, and you will about have it. Now, without getting too far into it, this is the kind of thing many of us can make and have made pretty easily as this, as it is one of the more forgiving, so the question of how worthwhile a sauce of this type with an entry point of $10 is. The sauce tastes quite good, assuming you like soy-ginger sauces, but it doing anything innovative or better? In other words, how do we justify that price point for this, aside from convenience? 

For me, I can't. I do think this is a quite good sauce, but I enjoy that flavor quite a lot. I don't particularly like the mouth feel of this, which has a lot more little bits and pieces than I usually want in this kind of sauce, but the flavor is fine. Heat is non-existent, so what else? Well, we do have the unusual ingredients of both honey and apple cider vinegar for this kind of thing. I might, in fact, say this is the wrong vinegar to use here, but for that kind of sauce you basically need a sweetener and a vinegar of some kind, so that choice isn't super critical and doesn't change the heart of things particularly. I'm spending a lot of time on what is essentially a single grading point, but it's kind of fun sometimes to get a bit more into the process of these reviews...at least for me, since I rarely do it. As always, it's up to you to determine the value proposition yourself and as usual, YMMV. 

Bottom line: If you're unfamiliar with the soy-ginger sauces, this is a good, albeit much more concentrated, representation. This kind of sauce is generally for Asiatic dishes and moving it from there can result in interesting and sometimes delightful results, so it's worth experimenting.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 9
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 4