I tried about 75 hot sauces from 30 different companies this summer and reviewed around 50 of them here. The plan was to find my favourite styles, processes, ingredients - partly to keep hold of favourites and partly to inform the sauces I made.
I enjoyed lots of the classic flavours of pineapple, peach and mango in fermented sauces, but I also enjoyed the experiments of people like Devildog and Lazy Scientist with lists of ingredients like sour cherries, burnt orange, blackcurrant and seaweed. I was excited by Trodden Black’s use of Sea Buckthorn, but found that while I enjoyed the novelty of it, I rarely returned to it as a first choice with food.
I was surprised not to find a chipotle sauce I enjoyed. I love chipotle but none of the sauces I tried worked for me. I also feel I’ve got more exploring to do with Buffalo style hot sauces. None of the ones I picked up really excited me, although this might be one of those sauces that is better eaten fresh, stirring in the butter just before eating.
I’ve reduced the 75 to…
Six of the Best
· 7-Pot Pineapple
· Burning Desire Peppapot
· The Chilli Alchemist Gold
· Great Scott Peach Habanero
· Muti Troublemaker
· Devildog Smoked Trinidad Scorpion Brown Sauce
These are this year’s essentials. The 7-Pot Pineapple from Singularity has such a great flavour, but it’s also probably the hottest here. If it’s too wild, the pineapple and beer-based Gold was beautiful and devoured in just a few days.
The coconutty Peppapot had a completely different profile, and again it’s one I’ve played with in recipes this autumn and winter. The Peach & Habanero from Great Scott is sweet and fruity and with great pepper content, as well as being local, while the Troublemaker is a terrific everyday fermented sauce. Fermentation is something I hadn’t done until this year, but now I’ve got multiple fermentation jars on the go.
The Smoked Trinidad Scorpion is the only brown sauce you’ll need and is the winner of my side quest for the perfect pasty hot sauce. Somehow I managed to eat it all before reviewing it though, so I'll have to get another. Some of the chilli-based brown sauces I tried just tasted like brown sauces – they were nice, but not different enough from the stuff you’d buy at the supermarket for a fraction of the price. Devildog's is much better!
So that's it for hot sauce tasting. I'm up for trying more if something special comes along, and I was given three for Christmas, but mostly now I'm going to be about making them.
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