Matt in BloggersHot Sauce Reviews

Ka-Ranch Hot Sauce

Ka-Ranch hot sauce has the distinction of being the very first product I get the privilege to review free of charge. It wasn’t sent to me from Ka-Ranch, but it came from a good friend of mine who’d seen Ka-Ranch’s booth at a market in Dallas and was interested to get my take on it.

I had never heard of Ka-Ranch, but I went to their webpage to get a look at some of their products. It turns out they offer an array items including BBQ sauce, jam, rubs, ketchup, mustard and relish, and each product is crossed with at least one kind of pepper. For instance, their mustard is a habanero mustard, their ketchup a jalapeño ketchup, and so on.

While I was holding the bottle of Ka-Ranch’s hot sauce, what I noticed first was its dark color and thick consistency reminiscent of steak sauce. When I opened the bottle and smelled the aroma it only reinforced the steak sauce associations I had already formed, and I wondered if it would also taste like steak sauce. And, it did; yet, with a quite a bit more kick than your average steak sauce. The combination of chipotles, habaneros, and cayenne among garlic, onion, vinegar and salt helped to explain this. However, it had a pronounced Worcestershire sauce flavor, which is good with other ingredients, like in a BBQ sauce or sweet and smoky baked beans, but for me, this kind of limits this sauces usage. I couldn’t help but think that this sauce could go well on steak, burgers, pizza and eggs, and maybe as an added ingredient in chilis and BBQ sauces, but I had a hard time thinking of other applications. Well, I didn’t have any steak, hamburger or pizza handy, so I tried Ka-Ranch on some eggs sunny side up, with Texas toast. What was once a rather overpowering Worcestershire flavor alone actually worked really well on an egg fold-over with buttery Texas toast. The zing from the vinegar helped to cut through, yet enhance the richness of the egg yolks and olive oil butter, while the chipotles left a pleasant blanket of smokiness which had me craving a down home Texas BBQ on what was already shaping up to be a hot day. Next time I have this sauce with eggs and toast, I’ll be sure to include some Owen’s or Jimmy Dean hot sausage as well, because I could already tell Ka-Ranch’s hot sauce would be a natural on these breakfast items as well.

Overall, I think this product is a solid first foray into the realm of hot sauce for Ka-Ranch BBQ Company; yet, I would really like to encourage them to continue to experiment with other combinations of ingredients and hotter peppers. Since hot sauces and other spicy condiments are currently one of the fastest growing industries, I think Ka-Ranch would greatly benefit from a whole line of hot sauces that is distinctly theirs, and that would also strengthen their brand identity in the minds of the growing audience of spicy foods aficionados across the country.