Review: TorchBearer Sugar Fire Sauce

After finishing off the jar of TorchBearers’ Slaughter Sauce and rather enjoying their ‘hottest’ offering, I decided to throw myself a curve ball and try out the jar of #11 Sugar Fire Sauce. Now I say curve ball because lately I’ve been on a habanero/super hot kick and my stomach needed a day of rest. Since the TorchBearer line goes up the heat scale in numerical order (#1 is the mildest & #42 is the hottest) I decided on #11 – pretty mild and with a promise of sweetness.

Description from site: Ice cream, pies, cakes, just like all of our sauces, Sugar Fire can go on anything but its better on dessert. The sauce is sweet and delicious with just a little bit of spice; it’s really not like anything else. The sweet tooth and the chili-heads rejoice.

Sugar Fire hot sauce is available in 8 oz. jars.

Description on bottle: Feller by the name of Big Time used to eat more than 12 men and 4 horses combined. 3 breakfasts, 1 brunch, 2 lunches, 4 suppers and a couple of dinners everyday. Said he wasn’t really hungry, just was lookin’ to satisfy his flavor tooth. His mamma whipped the tar out of him, then gave him a jar of #11. He never had problems finding good flavor after that. To this day, his mamma uses his fat pants to tarp her woodpile.

Ingredients: Papaya, Mango, Mandarin Oranges, Habanero Peppers, Brown Sugar, Pumpkin Spice.
A relatively short list of ingredients, which I generally regard as the mark of a good sauce – the fewer the ingredients the better.

In my pack of TorchBearer Sauces they also threw in a handy recipe booklet and fortunately all the recipes included are also available online here. I always love to see what the manufacturer thinks of their sauce and the methods that they suggest for using them and the guys at TorchBearer have really gone all out on their sauces. But pancakes? Yes, Pancakes!

TorchBearer Pancakes
Ingredients:
* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 tablespoon baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 1 tablespoon sugar
* 1 or 2 eggs
* 1 1/2 to 2 cups milk
* 2 tablespoons melted and cooled butter (optional)
* 1 Tablespoon TorchBearer Sauce Sultry Sauce

Directions:
Mix all of the dry ingredients together. Add half of the milk, all of the eggs, the butter, the TorchBearer Sauce and mix. Add milk until the batter forms. It doesn’t have to be blended completely, some lumps are okay. The batter should not be soupy, so be careful when adding the last part of milk, you may not need it all.

Cook on a skillet, or pan, on medium low heat. You may need to add need to add oil or butter to pan to keep the pancakes from sticking. Let the pancake brown on one side for about 3-4 minutes depending on how hot the cooking surface is. Flip using a spatula and let it brown slightly on that side. You are looking for a golden brown color, not burnt.

Here’s an excellent example of how well I don’t follow recipes. The above recipe calls for the Sultry Sauce – strike one. And instead of making the batter, I opted for the lazier solution and reached for the Aunt Jemima – she may never forgive me for this. When I first opened SugarFire, I conducted the standard smell test. Results: Smells like diluted pumpkin batter – no hint of habaneros, which I wasn’t expecting with #11.
The papaya & mango are present in the aroma, but over powered by the pumpkin spice.

BAM!
At this point, I’m not holding out much hope for my breakfast.

And here you have it, a nice stack of hot sauce infused pancakes.

Overall
SugarFire seems more like a spicy pumpkin sauce then a sweet habanero sauce. That being said, there are plenty of uses for a sauce like this. I can envision heating a bit up and using it on ice cream or a warm slice of pie. It’s not a sauce I would use on anything that wasn’t already a bit sweet, the sweetness and pumpkin flavor scream DESSERT sauce, which is exactly what TorchBearer had in mind with this one.