Posted September 20, 2007 by Justin in Reviews

Review: Hotternell’s con Diablo Hot Sauce

Of all the sauces I received in my first box of items to review this is the one I most looked forward to trying. All I have had from Hotternell in the past is extracts, and I have wanted to try his sauces for a while now. The con Diablo is $16.95 on his website, and without trying it or even hearing about it, this was just too much for me to spend. I tried this sauce on a spoon first, and it was really hot, also very runny, but I liked that about it, a lot of sauces this hot are super thick, and I prefer thinner sauces. It smelled like extracts, but on the spoon and in my second tasting, which was on a taco shell with melted nacho and shredded cheese (a QUESADILLA), the taste of the red savinas was present along side the extracts. For how hot this sauce is, it had decent flavor. My third try of the sauce was on some nacho chips and the extract flavor was a little stronger, possibly because on the taco shell I mixed it in with the cheese, and on the nachos (all the same ingredients as the (QUESADILLAS), I didn’t mix it in.

The amount I ate is a large amount for this sauce. The spoon test, the QUESADILLA, and the nachos where all eaten in the same sitting, in that order. I contacted Mike from Hotternell, to ask about the scoville rating of the sauce, and also what extract he made it with, and he replied with this:

“The ConDiablo is a nasty concoction with a healthy dose of 1 million SHU Capsicum Oleoresin. There’s about an oz in it. It’s approximately 1/2 million shu all done. I could make it over the million mark, but then they really start to taste like crap. As it is, the ConDiablo is not very tasty, just freakin’ hot”.

Its definitly very hot, and has about the flavor you would expect from a sauce that’s Â½ mill shu, the difference is that it tastes so much hotter than only Â½ mill shu.I was reading an interview with him that you can check out here
and in the interview he is talking about having his extracts made somewhere else and the better quality that he gets, “These are exceptionally clean products with no residuals. They are pharmaceutical grade, which is much purer than food grade.” Perhaps this is why it seems so much hotter than it tastes. Between the 3 different ways I sampled this sauce I used about 1/3 of my 1oz bottle, and it’s a really great product, not recommended for unexperienced chili heads though. The stomach pains didn’t hit me untill almost 6 Â½ hours latter, I finished my meal around 3am and was woke up this morning with razor blades in my stomach around 9:30am, I have never had a sauce take this long to hit me after eating it. it hit me hard but only lasted about 20 min. very hot, excellent product.

Buying info: the bottle I received has no info (it’s a one ounce sample bottle) but im familiar with his stuff, and actually have the website in my favorites. www.hotternell.com you should also keep watch on eBay for his stuff.

Ingredients: red Savina habanero pepper, vinegar, capsicum oleoresin.

Taste: 4.5/10. when smelling it all you get is the extracts, but the red savina’s flavor comes out a little when eating it, not enough to make it taste good, but it dose make it a little better.

Heat: 10/10 its not pure crystals or anything but in the everyday use category its 10/10. I was surprised that it was only Â½ mill shu, because it tasted a lot hotter. This sauce really got my nose running, and my sweat flowing.

Smell: 1/10 it smells like extracts.

Consistency/thickness: 9.5/10 It’s thin but like I said above, for a sauce this hot that’s a good thing. (in my opinion) if you have to worry about it dripping off your food, you are probably using to much.

Value: This is the biggest thing hurting the overall rating. At 16.95 for 5oz it is a little more expensive than other sauces of the same heat level, I liked this sauce a lot better than most sauces on its level, just because of how much hotter it tastes, and how thin it is. There is a good chance of me buying this sauce again, but with cheaper one’s out there it wont be a regular in my fridge.

Overall/recommendation: 7/10 I really did enjoy this sauce, and it’s an excellent product, I would recommend it to all the true chili heads that love a good extreme sauce, I’m just not sure if its worth the difference in price between some of the other sauces out there, but it is definitely worth buying at least once to judge for yourself.