Ingredients: Tomato paste, water, pepper extract, vinegar, sugar, molasses, soy sauce.

Back when Joe and Linda were in town, we headed over to the local hot sauce shop, Light My Fire. I couldn’t help picking up a bottle of Endorphin Rush Beyond Hot Sauce. I must admit, I was tricked by the name and psychedelic label…darn marketing ploys playing on my common sense….

As always, the first test I do is the finger taste. This allows me to sample the heat and taste to determine how much to use and on what foods to use it on. As you can see in the picture below, the first taste feels like a brick to the face (please note the bulging neck tendons and scrunched up face)!

One soon realizes that the brick that hit your face was only made out of cheap styrofoam. The heat dies back within a few seconds (as confirmed by a low-medium heat tolerant roommate, Dave Reed). So what was the surprise, face scrunching taste if not the heat? It’s the pepper extract! Some of you are now saying, “But isn’t that the heat?” and those people are right. When you extract capsaicin, generally you use ketones, which leave as bitter, metallic taste behind and that is what’s going on with this little sauce.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is a really interesting hot sauce. The taste, extract bitterness aside, is very intriguing. The ingredients blend really well and the molasses and tomato paste stand out as the major flavors. It will leave you tongue in pain and tears in you eyes if you eat a lot of it at once (ie: copious amounts on a burrito). Unfortunately, no endorphin rush occurred.

Taste: 7, Heat: 8.7267

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