The bad news is that Aztexan has only one product it can be proud of. The good news is that they have only one product. Their Habanero Supreme is a flavorful sauce that also packs a punch on the taste buds. The folks at Aztexan have brilliantly crafted a habanero pepper sauce with just the right amount of heat: a lot. It very well could be a standard by which all other habanero sauces should be measured. Sure, we’ve all heard the tales of balancing heat and flavor, yada, yada, yada. But I suppose that’s what the Aztexan bottlers have done here. They’ve made tremendously spicy product that tastes good, too.

Upon opening the bottle, I was greeted with the familiar scent of vinegar, which was not totally unexpected. It’s in a small conical bottle; it’s a hot sauce. It’s going to have vinegar. What was not expected was the incredibly strong smell of vinegar, a fact that did not please my senses. Since I did sample this sauce a number of times at Hot Sauce Fest, I knew in advance that the harsh vinegar smell did not directly reflect on the flavor.

The ingredients were simple and natural, as they should be. Sun-ripened Habaneros, garlic, onions, carrots, vinegar, lime juice, and salt. No complaints here.

I laid out a few tortilla chips and began to shake the sauce out. Nothing happened. Aztexan is a thick sauce, definitely thicker than most pepper sauces that we know and love. I would almost tend to term the Habanero Supreme as a very thin and concentrated salsa. Maybe not that far, but the stuff doesn’t slide out of the bottle like Tabasco. Backing up to the previous paragraph, vinegar was five places down on the ingredients list, a fact that speaks to its thickness.

The heat struck me fast and furious right on the tip of the tongue. It was there that the Habanero Supreme did the most damage. Unlike Big Daddy Jake’s, this pepper sauce stuck around for a long time, and the more I ate, the more the heat piled on. Just the way it should be. I mixed some of the pepper sauce in with a couple of dollops of sour cream for dipping chips into. Amazingly, the sour cream didn’t do much to dilute the heat. TheWife came in and started dipping right along with me.

Woo! That is SPICY! she shouted with glee. This is the perfect dip right here. Don’t need anything else. Sour cream and Aztexan.

That pretty much sums up my views as well.

The flavor of Habanero Supreme is very strong; it’s very garlicky and pepper-y. I tried putting this sauce on my eggs this evening, and it just didn’t work out. I could hardly taste the eggs behind the furnace of the pepper sauce. It was the same with macaroni and cheese.

Aztexan would go very well as an accompaniment to other flavors. As said before it went well as a dip kicker-upper. It would do extremely well in barbeque sauces, rubbed on meats for grilling, and added to tomato-based sauces. And dishes like barbeque beans, tortilla soups, and Menudo would do well to have some of this whupass added.

Aside from its intense flavor, I consider Aztexan’s Habanero Supreme to be one of the best pepper sauces I’ve ever sampled. It’s potent; it tastes good, and will go well accompanying other foods.

Rating: 9 out of 10 chiles