Ingredients: Jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, onions, vinegar, tomato paste, brown sugar, molasses, soy sauce, garlic, crushed red pepper, salt, herbs and seasonings
Label: “If you’re reading this then you probably love hot sauce as much as I do. I take great pride in preparing and making my sauces. This is a unique Chef D Rocks Style Jalapeno sauce. Use it on seafood, chicken, or pork to spice things up. Try it in a salsa or on a taco. With its bold and zesty flavor it’s also the perfect solution for an excellent steak sauce. And of course, it’s amazing on gator tail!”
Appearance: The sauce is a nice, deep red in color, with noticeable bits of spices and red pepper flakes afloat in it.
Consistency: Pours wonderfully, nice and slow. The sauce is quite thick, and seems to enjoy its trip from the bottle. The sauce holds together well, though it still has some leg to it.
Smell: Smells like a good barbecue sauce. The garlic is noticeable, though not overpowering.
Heat: Ummmm, yeah. Being a jalapeno-based sauce, it of course doesn’t have the heat of the habanero sauces out there. The bottle claims that this sauce is medium-hot, but I’d have to come down a little from there to low-medium. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being hottest, I’d probably give this somewhere between 3 and 4.
Taste: For my first taste of this sauce, I enlisted the help of a close friend of mine, Ryan. Ryan is a fellow chilihead, and makes a killer salsa with jalapenos and habaneros from his backyard garden. We decided to add this sauce to some authentic Cajun boudain while making gumbo. This sauce did add a nice smoky flavor to the boudain, though it’s much better suited to chicken, ribs, or pork; essentially, this sauce fits anywhere you would normally use a nice spicy barbecue sauce. As you can see in the pic, it sits atop the boudain quite nicely. We were going to try it in gumbo, but decided against it because of the full-on barbecue flavor.
After trying it on boudain, we tried it directly from a spoon, to get the full flavor of the sauce. Though the sauce contains vinegar, it doesn’t stand out obnoxiously, and the molasses and brown sugar give this sauce a nice, light sweetness. The heat doesn’t come on too strong. It starts as a nice tickle at the back of the throat, and slowly makes its way forward, delighting taste buds as it does. It leaves behind a good sting on the lips, too!
Conclusion: A great sauce to be sure, but it could use a touch more heat. The garlic, spices, molasses, and brown sugar meld together seamlessly. This sauce should be sold in a larger bottle, so that it could be used as liberally as you might use a normal barbecue sauce.
Overall rating: 4.5