Danny Cash's Bottled Up Anger Garlic Serrano Hot Sauce
As far as I can tell, this is either a relabeled bottle of the Salvation Garlic-Serrano sauce or a very close derivative. Like the Killer Chipotle vs. Happy Beaver similarity and/or duplication I experienced earlier this year, I'm not going to re-review this sauce.
I will, however, note that the Bottled Up Anger bottle I have has slightly more heat than did the Salvation Sauce, still not enough to really register, though. Also, my wife loves this particular style of sauce and uses it frequently on almost everything, so it's one step from becoming a staple, at least for her. I don't mind at all, of course. It is a very well-crafted sauce and headed up the short list for sauce of the year 2013...
Bottom line: See the link in the review.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 7
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8
Overall: 6
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Salsa Mina Roja Sauce Review
Salsa Mina Roja Sauce
I hesitate to call this a "hot" sauce because it isn't especially, in any kind of proper sense. Rather, it is a curious blend of a fairly heavy tomatillo sauce crossed with a Mexican table sauce. It is very, very heavy on the tomatillos, which gives it an excellent thickness and the fire-roasting really adds an element that is unfortunately a bit too subtle. It is, however, somewhat of a sauce that doesn't know what it wants to be.
To be pushed as a "medium-hot" salsa, there has to be some heat presence. While this has a freshness that makes it frequently distracting and despite jalapenos being listed as the second ingredient, there is no real heat here. In fact, this sauce by itself, I frankly consider largely unusable. With that thickness and texture, this could easily be used as a dipping sauce, but the taste registers as largely incomplete or unfinished.
Enter the saving grace of using this in conjunction with the Salsa Mina Hot Sauce. Those sort of blunting and dulling aspects of this sauce do a nice job of tempering down that obnoxious vinegar hammer in the other sauce while the slight heat of that one rounds this out nice and makes it a pleasant sauce to enjoy in abundance. Getting the ratio down does take some practice, though, but at $1.80 bottle for this and the other, you're talking about approximately $4 for about 18 oz. of sauce, so there's lots of room to practice. Unfortunately, because this sauce (and the other) require companion sauces to make them palatable, the respective scores will be cut down accordingly.
Bottom line: As with all sauces, this one is rated by itself as a standalone. On that basis, it's not a sauce I would consider every buying again. Together, the aggregate score for both this and the Hot Sauce winds up being a 4, which is more or less on the money. I'd even be inclined to nudge it to a 5, but having to go through that kind of work must necessarily be taken into account also.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 2
Flexibility: 2
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1
Overall: 1
I hesitate to call this a "hot" sauce because it isn't especially, in any kind of proper sense. Rather, it is a curious blend of a fairly heavy tomatillo sauce crossed with a Mexican table sauce. It is very, very heavy on the tomatillos, which gives it an excellent thickness and the fire-roasting really adds an element that is unfortunately a bit too subtle. It is, however, somewhat of a sauce that doesn't know what it wants to be.
To be pushed as a "medium-hot" salsa, there has to be some heat presence. While this has a freshness that makes it frequently distracting and despite jalapenos being listed as the second ingredient, there is no real heat here. In fact, this sauce by itself, I frankly consider largely unusable. With that thickness and texture, this could easily be used as a dipping sauce, but the taste registers as largely incomplete or unfinished.
Enter the saving grace of using this in conjunction with the Salsa Mina Hot Sauce. Those sort of blunting and dulling aspects of this sauce do a nice job of tempering down that obnoxious vinegar hammer in the other sauce while the slight heat of that one rounds this out nice and makes it a pleasant sauce to enjoy in abundance. Getting the ratio down does take some practice, though, but at $1.80 bottle for this and the other, you're talking about approximately $4 for about 18 oz. of sauce, so there's lots of room to practice. Unfortunately, because this sauce (and the other) require companion sauces to make them palatable, the respective scores will be cut down accordingly.
Bottom line: As with all sauces, this one is rated by itself as a standalone. On that basis, it's not a sauce I would consider every buying again. Together, the aggregate score for both this and the Hot Sauce winds up being a 4, which is more or less on the money. I'd even be inclined to nudge it to a 5, but having to go through that kind of work must necessarily be taken into account also.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 2
Flexibility: 2
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1
Overall: 1
Salsa Mina Hot Sauce Review
Salsa Mina Hot Sauce
Here we have a tale of two sauces and by that I don't mean, it was the best of sauces, it was the worst of sauces...although I suppose that, in some ways, isn't too far off. This is another Big Lots special and when I saw it and the $1.80 price tag, which is over what I will consider safe territory there -- $1 or under and as long as it has neither extract nor onions, I'll give it a whack -- I passed it by until I happened to look closer at the label on a subsequent trip and saw those glorious words: "fire-roasted." Make it fire-roasted damn near anything and I'm in, so I picked up a bottle.
I like the Salsa Mina story. It reminds me a lot of the Tapatio story and though I'm not especially fond of that sauce, I do like the backstory. In this case, we have yet another entry into the Mexican table sauce category, only this time with fire-roasted chilis, which adds a dimension to the sauce I don't hesitate to call tremendous. Rich, full and flavorful, the roasting covers an area that nearly every other sauce is missing. That is definitely the good news.
The bad news is that this wonderful, wonderful fire-roasted goodness is almost completely drowned out by the vinegar that makes up the base here. It very obviously is a strong cheap white vinegar they use and it's overpowering. Louisiana-style sauces are heavy-heavy on vinegar and in the case of Red Devil, can be made to make a zingy flavorful fine sauce, full of a great taste blend. Here, we have an unpleasant astringency that is dialed up way, way too high. If they cut the vinegar back by about 35 - 40% or so, this would be a strong contender for a brilliant, fantastic and unique sauce in a rather dull and placid market segment. As it is, I had to fight.
Some sauces, because I like part of them so much, I will try to find to make it work. I did that for a while here, even though the heat is maybe 5K SHU. Those fire-roasted chiles were nothing but love, but oh the waves of vinegar to fight through. When I was able to blunt, negate or otherwise dull those, it was a treat. When I couldn't, I looked at my 15 other bottles of unopened sauce, waiting patiently on the shelf and knew I had a hard decision coming. As it was, I managed to find a solution, but it requires another sauce (Salsa Mina's Roja -- review coming later), itself incomplete, to blend the two and make one pretty decent-tasting sauce...I suppose it is a testament to them that I would go through this trouble.
Bottom line: Had not that nasty overkill vinegar been there, taste would have been an easy 8. As it is, I can't ignore it and was going to deduct 3 from it. The last couple of days I struggled mightily with whether or not to toss it -- I hate wasting food -- and the save came from another sauce, so I think half is fair. I won't ever be buying this again, unless they dial down those wretched waves of vinegar. Too bad. Those fire-roasted chiles are nothing short of fantastic...when you can get to that taste.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 3
Here we have a tale of two sauces and by that I don't mean, it was the best of sauces, it was the worst of sauces...although I suppose that, in some ways, isn't too far off. This is another Big Lots special and when I saw it and the $1.80 price tag, which is over what I will consider safe territory there -- $1 or under and as long as it has neither extract nor onions, I'll give it a whack -- I passed it by until I happened to look closer at the label on a subsequent trip and saw those glorious words: "fire-roasted." Make it fire-roasted damn near anything and I'm in, so I picked up a bottle.
I like the Salsa Mina story. It reminds me a lot of the Tapatio story and though I'm not especially fond of that sauce, I do like the backstory. In this case, we have yet another entry into the Mexican table sauce category, only this time with fire-roasted chilis, which adds a dimension to the sauce I don't hesitate to call tremendous. Rich, full and flavorful, the roasting covers an area that nearly every other sauce is missing. That is definitely the good news.
The bad news is that this wonderful, wonderful fire-roasted goodness is almost completely drowned out by the vinegar that makes up the base here. It very obviously is a strong cheap white vinegar they use and it's overpowering. Louisiana-style sauces are heavy-heavy on vinegar and in the case of Red Devil, can be made to make a zingy flavorful fine sauce, full of a great taste blend. Here, we have an unpleasant astringency that is dialed up way, way too high. If they cut the vinegar back by about 35 - 40% or so, this would be a strong contender for a brilliant, fantastic and unique sauce in a rather dull and placid market segment. As it is, I had to fight.
Some sauces, because I like part of them so much, I will try to find to make it work. I did that for a while here, even though the heat is maybe 5K SHU. Those fire-roasted chiles were nothing but love, but oh the waves of vinegar to fight through. When I was able to blunt, negate or otherwise dull those, it was a treat. When I couldn't, I looked at my 15 other bottles of unopened sauce, waiting patiently on the shelf and knew I had a hard decision coming. As it was, I managed to find a solution, but it requires another sauce (Salsa Mina's Roja -- review coming later), itself incomplete, to blend the two and make one pretty decent-tasting sauce...I suppose it is a testament to them that I would go through this trouble.
Bottom line: Had not that nasty overkill vinegar been there, taste would have been an easy 8. As it is, I can't ignore it and was going to deduct 3 from it. The last couple of days I struggled mightily with whether or not to toss it -- I hate wasting food -- and the save came from another sauce, so I think half is fair. I won't ever be buying this again, unless they dial down those wretched waves of vinegar. Too bad. Those fire-roasted chiles are nothing short of fantastic...when you can get to that taste.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 3
Panola Fuego Habanero Hot Sauce Review
Panola Fuego Habanero Salsa
This is another of those Big Lots potentials, where for $.70, you might have a gold mine of a great sauce for a handful of change, but then again, you may have a bottle of shit on your hands and the worst is that you're only out $.70. So, for $1 or under, I'm never afraid to pick one of those up because you never know. From experience, what you encounter is what I like to call modified gems. This is one of them.
What we have here is a taste that rather uniquely blends habanero and blunts it with jalapeno. "Fuego," of course, is Spanish for "fire", but the heat is moderate, around El Yucateco Green, basically not into firehead territory but enough to be noticed. It is a taste that is unlike any other sauce and there's where it goes off the rail a bit. Somehow, in some way, it has a sort of creamy aspect to it. That facet I find quite jarring and in conjunction with the unique taste, which I wouldn't say was good, but don't find it exactly bad either, renders this as something of a miss rather than a hit.
It's a very runny sauce and probably could use a dropper cap. I fully expected it to be a Louisiana style sauce, but it threw me for a loop by heading off into...almost a hot wing sort of thing. Hot wings are something I almost never have these days, but I think this would be a very nice change of pace from the usual Buffalo (Louisiana) style sauces that I run across most of the time. I don't think I'd want it a lot there, though, either. It's one of those sauces that is interesting for the first half a bottle and afterwards, you find yourself struggling to use it. In my case, I'm saved by the expiration date (I picked this up at least half a year ago) and can toss it without any qualms. Also, $.70.
Bottom line: Perhaps a shining example of something that will do in a pinch, but you'll find yourself wishing you had something else. The unique taste was refreshing, for a while, but didn't really mesh too well with anything I tried it on, including tacos. I'm not sorry I tried it, but can't imagine a reason to ever get it again.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 4
Flavor: 3
Flexibility: 2
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 3
This is another of those Big Lots potentials, where for $.70, you might have a gold mine of a great sauce for a handful of change, but then again, you may have a bottle of shit on your hands and the worst is that you're only out $.70. So, for $1 or under, I'm never afraid to pick one of those up because you never know. From experience, what you encounter is what I like to call modified gems. This is one of them.
What we have here is a taste that rather uniquely blends habanero and blunts it with jalapeno. "Fuego," of course, is Spanish for "fire", but the heat is moderate, around El Yucateco Green, basically not into firehead territory but enough to be noticed. It is a taste that is unlike any other sauce and there's where it goes off the rail a bit. Somehow, in some way, it has a sort of creamy aspect to it. That facet I find quite jarring and in conjunction with the unique taste, which I wouldn't say was good, but don't find it exactly bad either, renders this as something of a miss rather than a hit.
It's a very runny sauce and probably could use a dropper cap. I fully expected it to be a Louisiana style sauce, but it threw me for a loop by heading off into...almost a hot wing sort of thing. Hot wings are something I almost never have these days, but I think this would be a very nice change of pace from the usual Buffalo (Louisiana) style sauces that I run across most of the time. I don't think I'd want it a lot there, though, either. It's one of those sauces that is interesting for the first half a bottle and afterwards, you find yourself struggling to use it. In my case, I'm saved by the expiration date (I picked this up at least half a year ago) and can toss it without any qualms. Also, $.70.
Bottom line: Perhaps a shining example of something that will do in a pinch, but you'll find yourself wishing you had something else. The unique taste was refreshing, for a while, but didn't really mesh too well with anything I tried it on, including tacos. I'm not sorry I tried it, but can't imagine a reason to ever get it again.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 4
Flavor: 3
Flexibility: 2
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 3
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Trappey's Bull Hot Sauce Review
Trappey's Bull Louisiana Hot Sauce
Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHDHEq25uJs
For this category, with this entry, I've now had the Louisiana style sauce with Cayenne peppers, Tabasco peppers, Jalapeno peppers, and Scorpion peppers, with Habanero on-deck and the Jolokia coming at some point in the future.Cayenne is still far and away my favorite and most of that is due to my beloved Red Devil, also made by Trappey's.
Like the Louisiana Hot Sauce from Trappey's, Bull uses red jalapeno peppers. This alters the taste somewhat from the Red Devil and deviates it in a much milder and not quite as good flavor. It does ratchet the heat up slightly from the relative non-existence of Red Devil to something right around Texas Pete. Again, not very much, but slight as it is, it's enough to notice.
Like both of the other two Trappey Sauces mentioned, it costs around $1 for a 5 oz. bottle with a restrictor cap. It wouldn't be something I would have ordinarily gotten, but I just so happened to run out of what I had left of the Texas Pete in the last couple of nights and the sauce I had in line for the next Louisiana style -- Panola (review coming shortly) -- was not at all a Louisiana-style sauce. That kind of sauce, as far as I'm concerned, is something to always have on hand, for when you need it, you need it.
Bottom line: Once again, Red Devil fends off another challenger to the Louisiana-style throne. Bull, while acceptable in a pinch, isn't something I would ever buy again if there was something better. It is, however, very representative of that style and for $1, the unfamiliar could do much worse than to pick up a bottle.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 6
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 4
A (slight) Change to Testing + a Degree of Miscellany
Some of the core foods I use to test sauces have historically been pizza, chicken strips, fish tacos, the Marie Callender "bricks" (frozen dinners), mac & cheese with tuna, eggs and anything on the grill. After much determination, I've found that McDonald's burgers have supplanted nearly all of those entries as the ideal food to test sauces against.
Why? Well, in the best case, such as anything Mexican, a sauce like Danny Cash's Salvation Garlic-Serrano Sauce will elevate it. If you start with a good food, it can make it very good or great, just push it right over the edge, but say I happened to get a fish taco at Rubio's. Their Salsa Picante is on a level nearly impossible to beat once there is the introduction of a single lime to it. As good as the Salvation Sauce is, it couldn't compete. Where I'm going with this is that if you take something already at a high level, you can only push it so high before run into detraction and the limit of diminishing returns.
In the case of McDonald's burgers, they're crap to begin with, but slap something like Happy Beaver on it and all of a sudden, you have something palatable or better. That, my friends, is the true mark of a high quality sauce, when it can elevate something as awful as that to a point where you wouldn't call it good, but you would definitely not mind eating it again.
As to the misc. part of this, after doing some searching around, I have found several other sites that are doing an abysmal job of listing ingredients. Look, industry, food intolerances and/or allergies are real. Do you really want to waste their money with potential customers buying something they can't eat or worse yet, they eat it anyway and get sick? You have to do better. None of you should be selling a sauce without the ingredients listed somewhere people can see it before they click that button to add it to the cart. While you're at it, adding estimated SHU ratings wouldn't hurt either, but that ingredients thing...come on. Stop being so lazy.
Why? Well, in the best case, such as anything Mexican, a sauce like Danny Cash's Salvation Garlic-Serrano Sauce will elevate it. If you start with a good food, it can make it very good or great, just push it right over the edge, but say I happened to get a fish taco at Rubio's. Their Salsa Picante is on a level nearly impossible to beat once there is the introduction of a single lime to it. As good as the Salvation Sauce is, it couldn't compete. Where I'm going with this is that if you take something already at a high level, you can only push it so high before run into detraction and the limit of diminishing returns.
In the case of McDonald's burgers, they're crap to begin with, but slap something like Happy Beaver on it and all of a sudden, you have something palatable or better. That, my friends, is the true mark of a high quality sauce, when it can elevate something as awful as that to a point where you wouldn't call it good, but you would definitely not mind eating it again.
As to the misc. part of this, after doing some searching around, I have found several other sites that are doing an abysmal job of listing ingredients. Look, industry, food intolerances and/or allergies are real. Do you really want to waste their money with potential customers buying something they can't eat or worse yet, they eat it anyway and get sick? You have to do better. None of you should be selling a sauce without the ingredients listed somewhere people can see it before they click that button to add it to the cart. While you're at it, adding estimated SHU ratings wouldn't hurt either, but that ingredients thing...come on. Stop being so lazy.
Hog's Ass Hot Sauce Review
Sauce Crafter's Hog's Ass Garlic-Habanero Hot Sauce
Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz0rlgeJm_U
I don't know who did it first, but the Garlic-Habanero type sauce seems to be almost a new category. I'm definitely a fan of it, though I'd hesitate to call that style sauce a staple. To my mind, it works well with lighter meats, such as fish and chicken and much less well with everything else, depending on the prominence of the garlic. Case in point, the Original Zakk Wylde Berzerker sauce from Blair (reviewed elsewhere here). It's heavy, heavy garlic makes it useful on pizza and seafood and fried foods in general, yet strip the garlic aspect and slight heat and ratchet up the astringency through the lime and what you are left with is the Q Heat Chipotle Slam, which is fantastic on fish tacos, but sort of ends there.
Hog's Ass is a similar style sauce, but instead of using limes, it uses oranges. The astringency is turned down, the heat is slightly up from either of those other two, but the garlic, while present, seems locked in a mortal battle with the Habanero. It's not overpowering to the extent of the El Yucateco Red, though this sauce itself very quickly can be, but rather like if you took the El Yucateco Red and combined it somewhat with that Berzerker and hit it with a dash of OJ. Of all the Garlic-Habanero sauces I've tried, this one probably is my favorite, both in terms of flexibility and taste. The company's tagline that this is the best-tasting G-H sauce has yet to be determined, of course, but unlike some sauces where I've struggled to finish the bottle (I truly hate waste in general), this one I'm trying to reserve for a fantastic crab sandwich from a deli down the block because I think that sauce would be spectacular on it. Sad to say, there's probably not enough left for more than half a sandwich at this point, though.
Of some amusement also is the sort of vulgar nature that populates both the label and marketing scheme behind this sauce (clothing that states "you can bite a hog's ass if you don't like my cooking", a play on the slogan of the sauce "you can bite a hog's ass if you don't like our sauce") and the entire line.
Bottom line: If you're looking to check out a Garlic-Habanero sauce, you could do worse than to start here. This is the best representative of that sauce class I've found so far and it is a well-rounded and overall quite tasty sauce, though like many of the other sauces in that class, flexibility is not particularly high. It's not enough to make me want to add Garlic-Habanero to my list of staple sauces, but I wouldn't hesitate to buy this again at some point in the future.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 1
Flavor: 7
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8
Overall: 5
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Killer Chipotle Hot Sauce Review
CaJohn's Killer Chipotle Hot Sauce
UPDATE: Video support available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T22R0H3HBFA
The original review for this sauce was written and posted on January 26, 2013. In one of the very rarest of occasions, I have decided to toss the entire previous review, as it was erroneous, and about 2/3 of it did not address the sauce at all, but rather inappropriately some of the hot sauce industry gripes I had at the time. This review, written and re-posted on December 20, 2020, is the salient one. I almost thought of deleting the entry entirely and doing a completely new review, but ultimately decided against it, because I had to redress the wrong that previously held this space.
I don't think I make that kind of statement without explaining a bit of the backstory, so if that is not of interest, skip ahead a couple paragraphs. Back in 2013, I was, as it seems like I've forever been, on the hunt for the "perfect" Mexican-style sauce, or at least one I would love enough to want to eat frequently enough to be my Standard. I thought I had found it a few times in the intervening years, but at the time of this, I had not. 2012 was my upgrade into the much wider open world of hot sauces than I have previously been familiar and I was greatly impressed by nearly everything I've had from CaJohn's, home of ace sauce mastermind John Hard. So, I already had inklings that I like a bit of smokiness for my Mexican-style sauces and that, of course, is the very nature of Chipotle.
I got the bottle and I wish now I had been doing pictures then, as the ingredient list was virtually identical to that of Happy Beaver. The sauce consistency, flavor, heat, everything was the same and I naturally thought it was a clone. I wasn't hugely bothered by this, as Happy Beaver has been on my Standard list since I've had it and it was a sauce I thought of so fondly, it was my first ever Sauce Of The Year in 2012, in a "year" that was only about three months, given the life of this blog. One of the other contenders it beat out that year was another CaJohn's entry, in fact. With this new bottle I have now, it is clear the sauces could not be more radically different. This one is runny and comes with a restrictor cap and flavor is wildly different (I got this and Angry Beaver and re-tested them side by side, as I always now do for the FOH video series, to confirm my memory of the impressions I had as well as these various written reviews over time). This leads me to suspect I either got a bottle that was mislabeled or this sauce (Happy Beaver is largely the same) has been reformulated.
What we have here is a very runny sauce, watery, in fact, somewhat reminiscent of a Louisiana-style sauce or a Tabasco. Indeed, the flavor profile is strikingly similar to the Tabasco Chipotle (also reviewed in this blog) and is nearly identical to the Dat'l Chipotle from the Brewer's 6 Pack (see Mini-Reviews) that I reviewed around this time last year. While the taste is closest to that Dat'l, which is a strong taste of Chipotle in a vinegar base, this one has the addition of a few other elements that raise the heat level somewhat more than either of the others mentioned. This also means this will need to be agitated heavily prior to use and possibly during as well.
Flavor-wise, the taste is basically that of Chipotle and the flavoring agent used to achieve this is Chipotle powder. Like many other chileheads, I had a lot of concern that we would start to see some problems with the CaJohn's line after it was sold and there has definitely been a lot of reshuffling of the label ingredient panels on various sauces since that happened. The sauces have mostly held, flavor-wise, at least for now, but that kind of reshifting has led to a dilution of quality in other sauce lines, so the jury is still out.
Usage-wise, I wound up spiking barbeque sauce with the majority of that Brewer's Chipotle sauce, or using it to splash anywhere else I wanted a bit of smokiness. I suspect that will be the case with this and I will test it in the same applications I did with the Tabasco Chipotle, including ramen, to see how that shakes out, but I honestly do not have much use for that style of sauce and it took me quite some time to work through the Brewer Chipotle. It is, however, far too good of a sauce to bin.
Bottom line: If you like strongly vinegar-based sauce and feel that yours needs both some smokiness and a higher degree of heat than most else of what's out there, this is your ticket.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 1
Flavor: 7
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 4
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Salvation Garlic-Serrano Sauce Review
Danny Cash's Salvation Sauce Garlic-Serrano
Danny Cash, perhaps beyond hot sauce up-and-comer by now, was another name on my short list of maker of sauces to immediately try. That he's made a name for himself, in an increasingly crowded field, should be indication that he is a force to be reckoned with, but I didn't have opportunity to try his sauces until I did a bunch of buying around Christmastime.
I knew the backstory behind the Salvation Sauce and Cash's humble beginnings as sauce chef and his success story by making fantastic sauces and keeping a handle on himself is a great one in its own right. That he is giving back is more icing, but even though I'm not, by anyone's definition, religious one bit, I back people helping out other people who need it. I think the lines sometimes get confused, where people seem to mistake that whole "Lord helps those who help themselves" to mean that "Lord" helps those when they help themselves to whatever's in my pocketbook or what they can scrounge by holding cardboard at traffic lights, but I have great respect for anyone who can look past that and do what they can for all comers. That I personally am unable to do that doesn't mean I look past or slight those who can.
Enough of that, though, what about the sauce? For a sauce to display that proud and prominent cross on the front, it better be something that one doesn't taste and feel ripped off and in the taste department, this sauce delivers in spades. The ad copys calls it a the bite of lime & serrano and the back heat of habanero, but I would call it more along the lines of one of the very best tomatillo sauces, which this appears to be modeled on, minus the actual tomatillos. Take the Rubio's chain, as I digress momentarily. They have an excellent red sauce that, if I recall right, they call "Picante" and it has blackened bits of what I think is chipotle in it. It is fantastic on their entree's and I recommend it and those entree's highly. They also have a green sauce that I like a bit less and this sauce reminds of that a lot, meaning it is still an excellent sauce, but has a definite limit to applications.
While extremely tasty on lighter meats such as chicken, pork and fish, it is not a strong enough carrier to be used as a dipping sauce and fails woefully on pizza and anything else that does not meld well with sauces that carry this kind of astringency. It also has a confusing restrictor cap and the mini Bible, while kind of neat from the aspect of "wow, that's really small text and still somehow legible, kinda" is not practical and honestly, a bit useless. My major complaint, though I do enjoy this sauce quite a lot, is the heat level. Look, my wife struggles with heat in a major, major fashion. If she is able to tolerate a sauce, that means it's not particularly hot. If she enjoys it, such as she does this one, as immensely as she does, it definitely means there is little heat at all to it and this is the case here, also a trait echoing that of most tomatillo sauces.
Bottom line: Danny Cash, the positive stuff I've read about you and your sauces I find to be true. You have made here a fantastic sauce, albeit a bit limited in application and without any real heat, but still truly a marvelous taste experience. While this will not find itself a staple for me (but maybe for the wife), it does indicate to me that you belong in the league of hot sauce luminaries such as John Hard and Blair Lazar and unquestionably, you can hold your own. If this had any real heat to speak of, it would be an instant contender for Sauce Of The Year 2013. As it is, I find it a pleasant experience at $7.95/5 oz. bottle, but not a necessary one. I will definitely be hitting up other stuff in your line, though, because you are clearly a very, very real talent.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 7
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8
Overall: 6
Danny Cash, perhaps beyond hot sauce up-and-comer by now, was another name on my short list of maker of sauces to immediately try. That he's made a name for himself, in an increasingly crowded field, should be indication that he is a force to be reckoned with, but I didn't have opportunity to try his sauces until I did a bunch of buying around Christmastime.
I knew the backstory behind the Salvation Sauce and Cash's humble beginnings as sauce chef and his success story by making fantastic sauces and keeping a handle on himself is a great one in its own right. That he is giving back is more icing, but even though I'm not, by anyone's definition, religious one bit, I back people helping out other people who need it. I think the lines sometimes get confused, where people seem to mistake that whole "Lord helps those who help themselves" to mean that "Lord" helps those when they help themselves to whatever's in my pocketbook or what they can scrounge by holding cardboard at traffic lights, but I have great respect for anyone who can look past that and do what they can for all comers. That I personally am unable to do that doesn't mean I look past or slight those who can.
Enough of that, though, what about the sauce? For a sauce to display that proud and prominent cross on the front, it better be something that one doesn't taste and feel ripped off and in the taste department, this sauce delivers in spades. The ad copys calls it a the bite of lime & serrano and the back heat of habanero, but I would call it more along the lines of one of the very best tomatillo sauces, which this appears to be modeled on, minus the actual tomatillos. Take the Rubio's chain, as I digress momentarily. They have an excellent red sauce that, if I recall right, they call "Picante" and it has blackened bits of what I think is chipotle in it. It is fantastic on their entree's and I recommend it and those entree's highly. They also have a green sauce that I like a bit less and this sauce reminds of that a lot, meaning it is still an excellent sauce, but has a definite limit to applications.
While extremely tasty on lighter meats such as chicken, pork and fish, it is not a strong enough carrier to be used as a dipping sauce and fails woefully on pizza and anything else that does not meld well with sauces that carry this kind of astringency. It also has a confusing restrictor cap and the mini Bible, while kind of neat from the aspect of "wow, that's really small text and still somehow legible, kinda" is not practical and honestly, a bit useless. My major complaint, though I do enjoy this sauce quite a lot, is the heat level. Look, my wife struggles with heat in a major, major fashion. If she is able to tolerate a sauce, that means it's not particularly hot. If she enjoys it, such as she does this one, as immensely as she does, it definitely means there is little heat at all to it and this is the case here, also a trait echoing that of most tomatillo sauces.
Bottom line: Danny Cash, the positive stuff I've read about you and your sauces I find to be true. You have made here a fantastic sauce, albeit a bit limited in application and without any real heat, but still truly a marvelous taste experience. While this will not find itself a staple for me (but maybe for the wife), it does indicate to me that you belong in the league of hot sauce luminaries such as John Hard and Blair Lazar and unquestionably, you can hold your own. If this had any real heat to speak of, it would be an instant contender for Sauce Of The Year 2013. As it is, I find it a pleasant experience at $7.95/5 oz. bottle, but not a necessary one. I will definitely be hitting up other stuff in your line, though, because you are clearly a very, very real talent.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 7
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8
Overall: 6
Monday, January 7, 2013
Mae Ploy Sweet Chilli Sauce Review
Mae Ploy Sweet Chilli Sauce
I happened to be doing a touch of housecleaning in the fridge today when I noticed this thing in there. As I've said numerous times in the past, sweet hot is one of my very favorite flavor combinations and over the years, I've spent a great deal of time with Asian cuisine, so sweet chili sauce is something I'm intimately familiar with, nearly as ubiquitous as soy sauce or sesame oil. In particular, I've been trying to find the sauce I've long forgotten the name of and have tried for years to locate. It was a sweet chili and easily one of the best sauces I've had in my entire life.
This shit, however, ain't it. If there is one sauce that I thought it would be nearly impossible to fuck up, it would be this style. Even the cheap slop they have at the malls, while not exactly good, is edible and sometimes even palatable. This, sad to say, is neither. I can't quite place what exactly is making this derail, but it's almost like they used rotten something in there along the way. It lists pickled chilis as part of the recipe and if they were going for something along the lines of kimchi, they missed horribly. This stuff not only smells gut-wrenchingly awful, it tastes that way as well.
While this may not be the worst sauce I've ever had, it was far and away the worst last year, even of the pathetic sauce packets mislabeled as hot by your favorite chain "sorta" Mexican food purveyor. I don't eat those anymore, but I'd rather have those every day of the week and twice on Sunday, even on Asian food, than to have this again. This literally wrecks everything it touches and is a noxious mess. It also has no real heat to speak of, though it still wouldn't be worth slugging through its putridity, even if it did.
Bottom line: I'd rather have the bottle in my ass then the sauce in my mouth. A total waste of money. It also "earns" my first negative rating.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: -4
Flexibility: 0
Enjoyment to dollar factor: -4
Overall: -2
I happened to be doing a touch of housecleaning in the fridge today when I noticed this thing in there. As I've said numerous times in the past, sweet hot is one of my very favorite flavor combinations and over the years, I've spent a great deal of time with Asian cuisine, so sweet chili sauce is something I'm intimately familiar with, nearly as ubiquitous as soy sauce or sesame oil. In particular, I've been trying to find the sauce I've long forgotten the name of and have tried for years to locate. It was a sweet chili and easily one of the best sauces I've had in my entire life.This shit, however, ain't it. If there is one sauce that I thought it would be nearly impossible to fuck up, it would be this style. Even the cheap slop they have at the malls, while not exactly good, is edible and sometimes even palatable. This, sad to say, is neither. I can't quite place what exactly is making this derail, but it's almost like they used rotten something in there along the way. It lists pickled chilis as part of the recipe and if they were going for something along the lines of kimchi, they missed horribly. This stuff not only smells gut-wrenchingly awful, it tastes that way as well.
While this may not be the worst sauce I've ever had, it was far and away the worst last year, even of the pathetic sauce packets mislabeled as hot by your favorite chain "sorta" Mexican food purveyor. I don't eat those anymore, but I'd rather have those every day of the week and twice on Sunday, even on Asian food, than to have this again. This literally wrecks everything it touches and is a noxious mess. It also has no real heat to speak of, though it still wouldn't be worth slugging through its putridity, even if it did.
Bottom line: I'd rather have the bottle in my ass then the sauce in my mouth. A total waste of money. It also "earns" my first negative rating.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: -4
Flexibility: 0
Enjoyment to dollar factor: -4
Overall: -2
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