The Salsa King - Cool Breeze Blazin’ Hot Sauce

Bottle Description: Fiery heat from Chili Pequins, a cool breeze of flavor added with juniper berries! A truly unique taste sensation.

Ingredients: Vinegar, chili, pequins, garlic, spices, juniper berries, salt

Container: All the sauces in the Salsa King sauce line pretty much look the same and I have no complaints about the packaging. It isn’t marketed to hardcore chili heads so you’ll most likely see this bottle at Gelson’s or Trader Joe’s

Appearance: Brown. The sauce looks kind of like Chinese fish paste with specks of pepper. This stuff has been blended a lot probably leading to it’s current color.

Smell: It kind of does smell like a cool breeze. You can smell the peppers, garlic and spices but lingering behind all those scents is the soft biting of the juniper berries that make the sauce smell more….effervescent I guess. It’s like how you smell a bottle of booze and how that always smells kind of thin and airy.

Consistency: Thick. This sauce unfortunately spends a lot of time in the neck of the bottle rubbernecking before it makes it to your plate.

Taste: The first line of flavor is your usual garlic, pepper and salt. But slowly the juniper berries creep into the flavor along with the vinegar. This creates the cool breeze that’s indicated in the name of the sauce. It comes on as a relatively heavy sauce but then tiptoes off. As nice as that is, the berries or vinegar or possible even the pequins make this sauce a little too bitter for the most discerning mouths. The taste is not mind-blowing but it’s tasty enough.

Heat: (6.6/10) This sauce will give you a light scorch. It won’t light you up and the heat seems to dissipate readily.

Field Test: If you’ve read the taste section you might be worried about the bitterness of the sauce. Counteracting it with salty foods will do you wonders. I discovered the bitterness when I first took a swig of the stuff for this review. On food I hardly noticed it at all. That being said, this sauce is pretty much an all purpose sauce. Light enough to go on anything. I love it on Italian food.

Final Word: Not too shabby. It’s a kind of sauce you’d carry around to eat with but you’re definitely not going to fall in love.

Overall: 7.0/10

The SalsaKing Fine SouthWestern Foods
P.O. Box 39005
Phoenix AZ 85069