Description from bottle: The tart flavor and dusty tones of the Cayenne Pepper can be used to liven soups and sauces. Cayenne Pepper is a medium heat pepper, which will add layers of flavor to your dining experience.

Ingredients: Cayenne Pepper, Salt and Vinegar.

After successfully finishing the bottle of Pure Jalapeno, I decided the Pure Cayenne would be the next victim. When opening the Cayenne, one needs to take just as much care when pulling the cork out, you don’t want to get 1/2 stuck in the bottle. When I removed the cork from the Cayenne, the same off color sludge had to be removed using the business end of a butter knife.

Field Test #1: Taco Express carne asada tortillas – Quite possibly my favorite medium, with Empanada Mama taking a close second. This cayenne pepper sauce served the tacos well, not too hot with a good thickness that stuck to the taco and didn’t drip all over my plate. Almost a ketchup like consitency which is pretty hard to find in cayenne based hot sauces. Dave’s Cool Cayenne & Texas Champange Cayenne certainly don’t have this stick to your tacos quality.

Field Test #2: Homemade french dip sandwiches – Last Sunday I slow-cooked a 4lb roast and come sandwich time, slathered a good layer of the Pure Cayenne onto the roll before adding the meat. The cayenne certainly added another layer of flavor to the sandwich – making me wish that my meat wasn’t as good as it was so I could enjoy the sauce even more. My tastebuds were torn with this one.

Tongue Application: With a tie result from the two field tests, I had to opt for the tie breaker – straight to the tongue application. The thickness of this sauce makes it fairly hard to have just a little bit, but even so I was not blown over by heat. However, the flavor was excellent. I ate a cayenne pepper straight from the plant and could hardly tell the difference between the two.

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That all being said, the keen eye can see in the full bottle photo that there is something wrong with the area near the cork. After my last tasting, the bottle was sitting on my desk for a little over a week when I noticed some salt forming around the cork.

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Theres not mention of a need to refrigerate on the bottle labels, so I’m thinking that once the plastic seal was removed, this sauce began fermenting again – or at least more rapidly. This may be the reason for the metallic taste that The Smoking Tongue experienced.

In the picture below, you can see the sludge that I’m talking about. It’s formed in the neck of the bottle and you can clearly see how thick it is. It’s important to note that the Pure Jalapeno I reviewed earlier and thus opened earlier did not experience any salt formations around the cork. It was subject to the exact same locations and enviromental factors as the Cayenne Pepper – so it must be something with either the pepper or the batch that the Cayenne was made from.

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So, the way I see it ~ These bottles contain a great recipe, but the fancy packaging raises the price which slows the turnover rate which causes the end consumer to get a less then savory surprise. I would love to see these sauces re-packaged into a standard (cheaper) bottle and a “Best if Used By:” date wouldn’t hurt.