Posted September 15, 2007 by Justin in Reviews

Review: Batten Island X-tra Hot Gourmet Sauce

This sauce smells mostly like brown sugar and raisins, which are also the major flavors of this sauce along with vinegar, apple (more of a hot apple cider taste), and a little cayenne. It’s a really sweet sauce but definitely not a desert sauce because the vinegar in it that just clashes with the other flavors. I don’t really like sweet sauces but decided to try it on pork chops because pork of any type is the only meat I really like to have anything sweet on. Growing up my mother would make it with brown sugar, honey glazes, cherry sauce, and stuff like that. The pork chops where grilled on the George Foreman grill by my wife (with a little butt rub seasoning on them). I poured a little on my plate and it was a good thickness, it poured easily and wasn’t to thin. I tried this sauce by itself prior to the pork chops and didn’t like it at all mainly because it was so sweet and tasted mostly of brown sugar, but with the meat it was a little better. It might be even better to cook the meat with the sauce on it. As the flavor fades away it leaves very little heat and an aftertaste of the same two main ingredients that you get in the smell, brown sugar and raisins. All in all I didn’t like it and will end up dumping it.

Ingredients: Raisins/ and or prunes, vinegar, apple, (one or more of the following: pears, papaya, mango), Habanero and cayenne pepper, tomato paste, brown sugar, garlic, onion, salt, and other exotic herbs and spices.

Taste: 2.5/10 I don’t like sweet sauces, and I try to judge sauces fairly when I get a type that’s not my favorite, but of all the sweet sauces I have had this is probably the worst, the vinegar doesn’t go well with the sweetness and the overall flavor is not very good.

Heat: despite the fact it says X-tra hot on the label; I would only give the heat a 1/10

Smell: 2.5/10.

Sweetness: 8/10 and it’s mostly from the brown sugar.

Overall: 2.5/10