2K21 Q2 Update

 2K21 Q2 Update

Continuing on with the idea this is going to be another strong year for posting, both on the blog and with the FOH video series. I’m at 285 posts total, including this one, for the blog (likely will hit 300 some time in Q3). On the FOH video side, in addition to Friday postings of any sauces that appeared on The Hot Ones and any holidays that seem fitting, I’ve also decided to do Friday posting, at least through grilling season, of mustards. So, keep your eye on Friday, if you like the FOH videos, as if there is a video on a Friday, it will be either a mustard or a sauce from The Hot Ones. If I keep up with the current pace of video posting, I will overtake the number of full reviews of sauces by the end of the year, with full review sauce video postings hitting 100 around August. It also means that the video posting overall could conceivably overtake the posts of the entire blog in 2022...

Speaking of The Hot Ones, the sauces for Season 15 are up. I don’t have a ton of commentary, other than Sean Evans is back on his bullshit with the return of Beyond Insanity, which also makes that season, by default, one in which I’ve already done one of the sauces. That leaves Season 14 as the only season I haven’t hit yet, so I’m going to move that one up for this year, I think, which will be touches in all of them. Of the 10 sauces, there are only 4 that I will be doing for Season 15, as the preponderance of onions is quite pronounced. Three of those 4 sauces I will be doing also appear in other seasons, so this one will be fairly easy to cover.

I finally got around to posting all the hot sauce support videos I shot in 2020. Still working on the non-sauce FOH content from last year, but that should be done by end of Q3...I think. Part of the challenge there is that there has been a lot of stuff in that market segment out this year and YouTube is often a very topical medium, meaning that there is a certain predilection towards current, latest-and-greatest product content. This has really pushed back a lot of those non-sauce content videos, given how far ahead I am (I have enough in the can (filmed & completed) right now to go past the end of 2021 on the non-hot sauce side). I’m trying to really taper down filming in that regard, but I probably will run out of non-hot sauce products entirely before the end of Q3. For sauces, they run behind the non-sauce stuff a bit, but I’m either through or very close to through Q3 right now.

In that light, I have filmed/posted what I expect to be the last previously reviewed (archive) sauce I do for 2021, as I just have far too much of a backlog at hand to keep playing around with those. I may or may not do any at all next year, depending on how consumption goes this year. My main priority was finishing videos for SOTY and the top-drawing reviews and both are done (with the exception in the latter category of the Zatarain’s, which I still haven’t found for an acceptable price). I have also changed up the old diet (again), but am still trying to find a way to keep incorporating hot sauces. I probably have around 3 dozen unopened bottles waiting, as I type this...

When it comes time to post the videos (I usually only post a month ahead), my process is generally to look at what is done and available and then choose either the best of those (in terms of video, not in terms of sauces) or the ones with the most commercial appeal. Sometimes, there is some other mitigating circumstance, such as if I have a support video for a sauce that Roger kicked my way, or if I have a SOTY candidate, etc. Sauces appearing on The Hot Ones are posted outside of the normal times and if I have any of those, I will just fill them in on the earliest available Friday, trying to pick a sauce that will probably breathe on its own, even with a potentially competing sauce posted normally (on Sunday) that close to it.

The Head To Head Battle of the Hot Nuts is concluded at Round 9. That series covers 38 different products. If I find other spicy nut products, they will probably be standalone reviews. Both sauces (overall, not strictly support videos) and non-sauce products are over 100 videos each. I will still continue filming the end-of-quarter Wing Things indefinitely, even after I conclude The Hot Ones sauces (I should have enough of those to make a separate playlist at some point this year, maybe Q3). I’m already looking ahead to 2022 to see what else I might be able to wrangle up. My guess is that non-sauce content will be either every other week or maybe once monthly, but that also depends on the various manufacturers. If they keep kicking out stuff that fits, it will have my interest. A few people have suggested I do some challenges (or fresh pods), but, again, that is not really what I’m about. I honestly have zero interest in fresh pods, but challenges, if they can fit into what I’m doing generally, are ones I would at least consider attempting. The challenges I have done have either been opportunistically (like I ran across it in a store) or by accident and that trend will continue. I’m about flavor first, which is throughout the blog, but also reflected very strongly in my various Yelp reviews, which you can click too off the widget on the right, if interested. Most, if not all, of the challenge stuff I’ve had has been poor-tasting, at best.

As far as 2021 being this sort of “year of the [Carolina] Reaper” that I mentioned last year, I’ve definitely added a lot more products with Reapers into the mix for this year. My frustration with those is that it kind of forces me to keep tolerance somewhat high, if I do not want to pay the price with stomach cramps. I think it’s an ok pepper overall, so far, but that part is annoying. I don’t need to do that with any other pepper and indeed, not much else, other than products with a fairly high extract content. I honestly right now don’t see that Reaper sauces or products generally are going to have much of a place in my regular rotation once I’m done with the current crop that I have and any Hot Ones sauces containing it that I have still remaining.

Karma Cosmic Dumpling Hot Sauce Review

Karma Cosmic Dumpling Hot Sauce

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8prgtWJ3Q

This is one that I found poking around on Roger's (Burn Your Tongue) Facebook page, back when I could do that [long story short, I don't have a Facebook account, never had, never will, so I can't login to view it these days] and came across this. As Asian-style sauces are ones I never seem to have enough of, this had my immediate interest and one of my subsequent "haul" trips up there, I located it and brought it back with me. 

Flavor-wise, this is very reminiscent of Asian-style sweet-hot sauces in general. The presences of soy, sesame, a touch of ginger and garlic are all there, but this particular variation is a lot more on the astringent side. Given that you would want to lean more heavily on the tang for fried stuff, such as wontons or gyoza, this makes a good degree of sense, but I find it also limits where I can use it, as you need to have something strongly flavored to offset that tang or it becomes a bit distracting.

Generally I'm not usually interested in Jalapeno sauces (I can't remember what the one prior to this or when it happened was - perhaps someday I will put together that pepper cross-reference), but this one was definitely worth stepping out for its very unique take on things. Given that pepper is the actual heat source, there is very little of it to be had here, again, very typical for most Asian-style sweet-hot sauces.

Bottom line: Short and sweet, but if you like your Asian-style sweet-hot sauces to be leaning more to the tangier side of things or if you want something more specifically to complement fried foods, this is well worth a look. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 5
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5

Overall: 3

Adoboloco Kolohe Kid Hot Sauce Review

Adoboloco Kolohe Kid Hot Sauce

Note: This sauce appears on Season 8 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvG61jbtFkU

I do not understand the fascination with apple cider vinegar. It always smells like sour sweatsocks to me, yet we see apple cider drinks, even gummies. It is one of my least-favorite vinegars, as long-time readers will note. Thus, using that as the platform, even if everything else in the sauce is great, it will render the sauce to mixed results with me, generally. However, it does have a very strong and distinctive taste and this sauce, rather interestingly, tries to play off against it. It's a novel idea, but I'm not sure it's entirely a successful one.

The idea here appears to be simple ingredients: Ghost pepper, the aforementioned vinegar, salt (I assume Hawaiian as this is a Hawaiian company), and garlic.Two of them are also prime components in Blair's Pure Death (also reviewed here), one of my very most favorite sauces. If you're expecting a Louisiana-style or Cajun sauce with alternate vinegars and peppers, you probably wouldn't be far off the mark. This is a very loose, very runny sauce and since there is no emulsifiers, is very prone to separation also. 

In the above comparison, which, while imprecise, is more on that not, this is where the flavor weakness of the superhots begins to show. With those other two, you generally have Cayenne, which is one of the better-flavored peppers out there, at least to my mind. Irazu, in fact, makes a Louisiana-style using Naga Jolokia backing up the Cayenne, which works wonderfully. Here, it is just the Ghost, which tries mightily to hold its own against the apple cider vinegar, but succumbs. So, too, with the Hawaiian salt. Garlic is lost entirely, which is a shame, as smoked garlic would have added a really wonderful note here. Alas...

Heat-wise, this is very moderate. They call it Medium-Hot, which is a meaningless term. The Ghost is being used for flavor, rather than heat, so while there is some bite, it is very mild comparatively. Ultimately, I find the way this sauce is constructed to be more interesting, rather than enticing. While you can pick out individual parts, if so inclined, this winds up as the whole being more than the sum of its parts, which I imagine is intentional. Being an interesting sauce, I don't find that it lends itself well or easily to anything I put it on. Without something to bind things in place, separation happens on usage and this is one that needs to be agitated during use. With that separation, though, the actual food flavors will tend to mask or eliminate some of the flavor notes and what is left can be palatable or leave one wishing for something else. If I'm being honest, most of it was the latter for me.

Bottom line: A bold experiment that I don't find entirely successful, this sauce, for me, is one to check out in the name of completeness for sauces appearing on The Hot Ones. As a curiosity, it is hard to see where it would fit into my current rotation.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5

Overall: 4

Fresco Chipotle & Habanero Hot Sauce Review

Fresco Chipotle & Habanero Hot Sauce

Note: This sauce appears on Season 12 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg5tEzO-nmwSo

I apparently thought the name of this sauce was Fresno, like the city, rather than Fresco, like a work of art. It definitely belongs in the latter category more than the former. As what happens when one has a lot of sauces at hand and has also reviewed or tasted a lot of sauces, they kind of blend together and fit sometimes neatly into various mental categories. When I see Chipotle or Habanero, my mind immediately goes flying off to Mexican style foods. In this case, that was rather a mistake as this is one food type that does not do well with this sauce. Mexican food is a very distinctive flavor, generally, and not gearing for that tends to preclude most sauces.

Once I got over my initial shock and read the label, I saw it was aimed much more at the Habanero carrot type sauces, which I thought for a while might be poised to make a strong surge towards the top of the market. That definitely did not happen, and I somewhat suspect that while the combination works well, it is ultimately a bit on the boring side also. Fresco rather neatly skirts this issue with the addition of black pepper. Black pepper is one of my most favorite flavors on the planet (and, like many other chileheads, is probably my first introduction to heat), but running across it in a hot sauce can often be very mixed results. Here, it is done exquisitely and makes this sauce, no question. When handled poorly, you get a bitter piperine mess. 

This one seems to do really well when it can stand somewhat by itself. Since this is grilling season, I used it to wonderful effect on some grilled chicken, but it is somewhat mild and even something like a hamburger can overpower it pretty quickly. It also does well in cream dishes, though one needs to use a bit more of it there. This perhaps points up one of the other issues with Habanero-carrot sauces in general - they don't have a ready steady application, unlike some of the other more established sauces. Heat here is very moderate. I think it was the third sauce on the season of Hot Ones it was on, which is about where it fits in the scheme of things, as far as incremental heat. 

Bottom line: A very curious, but delightful flavor, if a bit subtle, this is one of the better takes on the Habanero-carrot sauces and definitely one of the sauces from The Hot Ones show that has stood out.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 6

Xtreme Hot Sauce Review

Xtreme Hot Sauce

So...this little *ahem* gem I came across one day when I was trying to track down sauces that started with letters of the alphabet I had not done yet. At the time that was U, X, Y (also, if anyone knows of any sauce companies that start with either "U" or "Y" that have sauces that do not contain onions of any kind and are also not novelty sauces, do let me know). Even though this is not strictly "X" in the name of the sauce company, I am a bit fast and loose with the rules (you can see this via the TOC), I bought it because I could not find the actual sauce company name (until it was too late) under the guise of filling the role of an "X" sauce and that is damn well what it is going to do. Also, that particular company name does not appear anywhere in the TOC, like a few others. 

That particular company is Spicin Foods and had I known that in advance, I probably would not have gotten this. As it was, I was pretty nervous as their tendency is to take otherwise ok-tasting sauces and spike them pointlessly with extract. Sure enough, looking at the ingredient panel, that is precisely what we had here. Still, I gave it a go.

Heat-wise, it is definitely on the lower end of the spectrum, probably coming in below Pain 100% (also reviewed here elsewhere). Flavor-wise, I'd put it below that. Ostensibly, the ingredient panel suggests a Habanero carrot sauce, but this reads more like a muted version of Beyond Insanity (also reviewed elsewhere here). It is not anywhere near like taking the mouthful of ashes that Beyond Insanity is, but that flavor note is definitely present, strongly present, in fact. Unlike the Pain, I did not get any kind of read of flavor on this, but just the disgusting notes of the extract. So, this is short, sweet, one and done, and my 2nd to last sauce ever from Spicin (I still need to do Da Bomb Evolution). 

Bottom line: Noxious garbage, sure to ruin any foods to which it is applied. Yet another that will not be getting any accompanying video as this one was bad enough to make me stop eating during the middle of testing and binning the sauce once the photo was taken.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 0

Pepper Palace Kentucky Charred Chipotle Bourbon Hot Sauce Review

Pepper Palace Kentucky Charred Chipotle Bourbon Hot Sauce

The label indicates this one is made, hand crafted, no less, by Pepper Palace itself, in Tennessee. I will note that does not improve things much from some of the other offerings I've tried from them. In fact, if someone read me this list of ingredients and told me they were going to make a hot sauce out of it, I'd have told them to bin it right there and just start over.  This was never going to taste good, so no real surprise it doesn't...

So, why did I buy it, then? The scuttlebutt out there has been that Pepper Palace has been reverse-engineering the hot sauces of various other companies and putting them out there as theirs. So, I thought, given how many sauces I've now done and how ace my palate is, I would be in a good position to find out were this the case. This one, coming in a flask and called itself Kentucky Charred seemed to me to be taking aim more or less directly at something like the much-vaunted BICH (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) from CaJohn's. 

Now, I didn't look too closely at the label at the time, and I like to think that if I did, I would have skipped this, but they are two totally different sauces. In addition to the CaJohn's actually tasting great and working well on the grill, which are major differences already, they pour different, have difference viscosity and share very few ingredients. With Chipotle as the main pepper, it was also never going to be hot and there is no heat to speak of here. Instead, what we have is a sour, foot-vinegary mess that doesn't work on food, either at room temp, on the grill, or if the sauce is chilled. This is, in short, just a poorly-conceived and possibly executed worse sauce. This will not be appearing on the FOH video series as there's no way I want to either go through eating it again or wrecking other food with it.

Bottom line: I don't know where you'd use this...I could doctor it, to try to make it work, but there is not really enough there for me to work with and that's me "fixing" a sauce, not the sauce itself standing on its own. It's been a while since I've done this, but this one gets my rare AVOID recommendation.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: -80
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 0

Torchbearer Garlic Reaper Hot Sauce Review

Torchbearer Garlic Reaper Hot Sauce

This sauce appeared on Season 8 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLcTXfQiOao

Torchbearer is a company I'm definitely familiar with, having been aware of them nearly from inception. Their devotion is to all-natural sauces (including no emulsifiers or suspension agents), which results in some still incredibly, legitimately (as in naturally) hot concoctions that tend to be quite unlike anything else out there, including this. Part of the tendency of those sauces, aside from SOTY 2019 from them, is to clot up in the neck of the bottle and also to have a heat and flavor that shrieks of super hot presence. I'm thinking definitely of Rapture, which, at the time, was possibly the hottest non-extract sauce on the market and which had a tremendous build.

There were no Carolina Reapers at the time (or they'd surely have been in there, I imagine), but Torchbearer definitely makes up for lost time. The Hot Ones is one of those things in the industry, given the eyeballs on it, that's attractive to a lot of makers, so no surprise that Torchbearer jumped on board. I don't know if this was made for the show or if this was just a good opportunity to showcase some of their sauces with the newest superhot kid on the block, but either way, Torchbearer has provided a few sauces there. Given that I'm trying to work my way through as many of those as I can and this is the year of the Reaper for me, had my eye on this one for a little bit now.

Garlic Reaper is one of those sauces that is somewhat hard for me to come to terms with. I've gone through about half the bottle, at this point, and it is still somewhat hard to get a fix on it. The Hot Ones features chicken and, to be honest, that meat does not stand up well to this sauce. There is a richness and creaminess to this, from the oil base, but garlic flavor vacillates a lot here. It mostly takes like scorching superhot. This is not a particularly pleasant flavor, I will note, and it makes the sauce somewhat hard to find uses for. If you try to keep it with chicken, it will overpower what you have. Torchbearer recommends pizza (it's ok) and creamy pasta (much better), as that will stand up to the sauce better and you can even get some of those garlic notes, which should be a lot more forward here, but aren't. I thought part of it was because I was agitating the sauce insufficiently, but, that flavor profile issue has been consistent throughout (and also, if you can't agitate a sauce with half the bottle consumed, something is way wrong). I also found it to be excellent used on burgers and that is probably my favored setting for it.

This, like nearly every Torchbearer sauce I've had, is on the thicker side, though this one is smooth. It pours inconsistently because even though I've cleaned it out a couple times, the neck of the bottle keeps getting clotted up. I'm really unclear exactly why this sauce is so sticky. There are no sugars there (though there are a lot of other flavors that also don't really come through) that I can see. Maybe it's the garlic, possibly. Given that we have Carolina Reaper on board, this is also definitely somewhat blazing and judiciousness is necessary when using it, lest you oversauce. For me, this is a bit more because of the flavor, as the burn catches nearly immediately, but doesn't seem to build further especially quickly.

Bottom line: A very unusual sauce, but unless you like the taste of super hots (or are doing The Hot Ones thing), not particularly a necessary one. They could have had a really nice sauce here, but missed pretty wildly. This is mostly just a creamy superhot flavored sauce, with slight garlic accents here and there. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 4
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 3

Gindo's Original Hot Sauce Review

Gindo's Original Hot Sauce - [TSAAF Sauce Of The Year 2021]

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook or, better yet, head on over to his new online outlet where you can shop the widest selection available anywhere, www.burnyourtongueonline.com.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v03lz3Mf5TQ

As I mentioned in the Gindo's Honey Habanero review (elsewhere on this blog), Gindo's is one of those boutique, high-end sauce companies I hear a lot about and all of it favorable. Sometimes, the hype machine can go a bit nuts and things don't deliver on that promise, but with this, my second bottle of what I presume to be their marquee sauces (come in a square 8 oz. bottle), I have a strong suspicion that the entire line does. I went all the way back to the beginning of the blog to check and be sure, but this the first time I have ever had not only two different sauce companies have more than one sauce in contention for Sauce Of The Year (giving away the game a bit here, but yes, this one is definitely in the running), but it is the first time ever that the first two sauces I ever had from a company were also in contention for SOTY. 

So, this is definitely a great sauce. I really like the idea here, of the Honey Habanero featuring the orange Bells (to match the orange Habaneros) and this one, featuring the red Bells (to match the red Habaneros), which lends almost a nice tomato-esque aspect to things. You really get a good idea of the flavor differences between respective colors and I greatly admire and respect that. Both sauces are also reasonably simple, in terms of ingredients, so as to let the actual stars shine. Both also featured numerous references to Blair's Pure Death, though this is probably the closer of the two.

Like the Honey Habanero, this one has precious little heat. Also like that other one, this is really intended more towards the "everyday" type sauce. There's a laundry list of things this should pair well with and I have no doubt of that, as this has worked well on nearly everything I've tried it on. It has a flavor a bit reminiscent of the Blair's Pure Death (also reviewed on this blog), but not quite to the extent it is there. This is really its own sauce and I honestly enjoy eating it and try to chase down all the little flavor accents. It is truly a magnificent work.

Bottom line: If you enjoyed the Honey Habanero, but really want something a bit more savory for your everyday sauce, this one will fill the bill nicely. It is a testament to Gindo's mastery that each flavor preference for that usage is covered both to thoroughly and so spectacularly. Definite SOTY candidate. 

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 8

Pex Peppers Painapple Hot Sauce Review

Pex Peppers Painapple Hot Sauce

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6WxwLLSjVg

I bought this one last year and then promptly forgot about it until a bit ago, when I was casting about trying to get a line on how many Reaper sauces I had yet to do. As mentioned in my End Of Year piece for 2020, I had intended on getting to a lot more Reaper stuff this year, after largely giving the pepper a pass nearly entirely prior. I think this was part of a large collection of Pex Peppers sauces I had gotten while on sale and looking at the flavor profile, which is ostensibly pineapple and Carolina Reaper, I had somehow gotten it into my head that it was actually apple (like green apple) and Carolina Reaper, which did not seem to me to lend itself well to a bunch of stuff, unless I happened to be grilling. 

The sauce kind of reminds me a bit of both the Lemon Yellowjacket and the Wildberry Whoop Ass in that those superhots, Fatalii and 7 Pot Primo, respectively, begin to become assertive, fast in the former, a bit delayed in the latter, things get that old familiar superhot bitter tinge. This one jumps right to that, however, and I suspect it's because pineapple is not an especially dominant flavor. It is also shunted towards the rear of the ingredient panel, so instead, it reads more as a generalize sweet, which is mostly what we have here: a very aggressively bitter superhot that has a non-descript bit of sweetness to it.

What's also interesting is the sauce goes nearly right away to a full-on furnace, but then does not go any further. Unlike the other two sauces, it does not continue to build and the drop-off is nearly as fast as heat dosage. This is a pretty neat trick and I'm not sure how the peppers were managed to be tempered in this way. A lot of what I've described as the "cloying" nature of the Carolina Reapers is gone entirely here, in favor of more of a straightforward superhot bitterness, that could really be almost anything other than Scorpions, which always have that bit of floral note to them. I would put this probably below the Wildberry Whoop Ass in terms of heat overall, though initial heat, it's right there with the others.

On the less happy side, I really wanted this to retain a lot more pineapple flavoring. I love pineapple in my sauces and lament what could have been here. Going for a nice gloppy pineapple that also carries the kind of flavor that you don't want to stop eating would have been a neat trick. Instead, here we kind of have the inverse, where the sauce isn't bad enough not to use entirely, but I can't say it's very high on my list of sauces that I want to reach for, either. I'm sure I can doctor this into more my suiting, but that's not really the sauce being out there like that, then. That's me tinkering and having to modify. 

Bottom line: Pex Pepper has some interesting sauces, to be sure, but this is more of a thud, presenting an interesting aspect to the Carolina Reapers, but missing wildly on the fruit side of things.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 5
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3

Overall: 4

Frank's Red Hot Xtra Hot Sauce Review

Frank's Red Hot Xtra Hot Sauce

Note: Video support available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtIsFcLSnQs

Like Tabasco Original, it's hard for me to hate on Frank's too much because it's been around for a century, it means a lot to the industry as a whole, and it's a gateway to being a chilehead for a lot of folks. Like the Original Texas Pete, I also did a mini-review of the Frank's Original, which I have not particularly found enjoyable ever. I kind of hate the advertising, the "I put that S*#@ on everything," implying the vulgarity of putting "that shit" as in that sauce on everything, but treading a thin line because tying your product to the idea of putting actual shit on everything is probably beyond a bit unsound. I presume them to mean it as "I put that sauce on everything" but I suppose they feel a need to be cutesy with it and that's the kind of dull-minded, pedestrian nonsense that works well for whom they're trying to target. 

The idea that Frank's was the original sauce for the original Buffalo Wings in their first genesis ever is really doing a lot of work. It is likely also a false idea, but I'm not going to debate that. I will note that in the later 70s, the sauce was sold and became the commercial behemoth it is today. It is another of the actual national hot sauces out there and like nearly all of the rest of those, it is towards the lower end of the quality scale. It always has had a sort of innate "cheapness" in taste to me. but given that it's mass-produced by French's, I suppose that stands to reason. Still, for a lot of people, there is enough here to like that it catapults them into an exploration of what else is out there and as an industry-supporting chilehead, I respect that.

Unlike Texas Pete Original, this one does not have a very good-tasting base sauce. They clearly mean it to do double duty as a wing sauce, so it is a bit smoother and creamier than most Louisiana-style sauces tend to be. This may lend it to a wider variety of food types, in addition to cutting down the runniness somewhat. In the case of the Texas Pete Hotter (which is also reviewed here), they took a pretty solid base sauce and wrecked it entirely with the addition of extract, in the quest for greater "heat." Here, the difference, while present is somewhat minimized comparatively. The flavor of the Original Frank's Red Hot is a lot more present and intact, though there is still the noxious and bitter accompaniment of the extract. This sauce is also notably less hot than the Texas Pete Hotter, particularly if you compare both "extra hot" versions with their base originals. Also, like the Texas Pete Hotter, this one is more difficult to find, but, given the ubiquitous nature of Frank's Red Hot in general, it was much easier to find than the Texas Pete Hotter.

I honestly did not go into this expecting much. I'm familiar with Frank's Red Hot, as a lot of restaurants use it for the standard of their wing sauces. Despite me not being fond of it, it is a relatively innocuous, inoffensive sauce. Here, we have a sauce that is on the border of being too bitter to be of much use. Flavor, again, is sacrificed in the chase for heat and what is left is a sauce that combines the usual "cheap" flavor with the edgy bitterness of extract, but with very little heat rendered for all that. I'm still on the fence about whether or not I will finish the bottle. I suppose probably not, but there is a solid 12 ounces in this bottle, so I may keep playing around with it for a while to see if it works well on anything. I don't find usage of it as broad as they portray in commercials (they try really hard to sell it as an "everyday" sauce, but I don't find Louisiana style in general to be fitting for that and certainly not a poor example like Frank's) and generally just keep it for things that I would normally use a Louisiana-style on. With this, I have to restrict it further to only stronger tasting things, in the hope that the bitterness of the extract will be hopefully blunted.

Bottom line: Possibly the most famous hot sauce line nationally, if you like the Original Red Hot and feel like that hot sauce could use a little more actual "hot," this is maybe worth a go, but what modest flavor there is in that Original Red Hot is reduced in the quest for heat, of which only a moderate amount is actually delivered.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 2
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 3