There’s hot sauces that are hot and those that taste really good, and a special few that have both. This is one of those sauces. After trying the tiniest bit on the tip of my finger, I just knew that I was going to regret only having a mere 45 mL of sauce to use on my food.

My experience with satay sauces is pretty weak. We don’t go out to many places that serve this, and they certainly don’t spice it to favor the heat requirements of your average chilehead…or even the capsaicin-addicted chilehead like me. Satay sauces are most often used on skewered meat, but I suspected that this sauce was far more talented to be restricted to that usage. I looked on the ingredients list and saw:

Ingredients: apple cider, peanuts, finger peppers, cane sugar, orange habaneros, African chili, coconut, fresh ginger, honey, natural soy sauce, roasted garlic, fresh lemon juice, lemon-grass and lime leaf infusion, molasses, sea salt, cornstarch, 5-spice

While this list featured some of the usual suspects like orange habaneros, garlic, and other peppers, it also has some others you might not have expected like coconut, molasses, peanuts, and cane sugar. Heck, I don’t recall ever having seen lemon-grass and lime leaf infusion used in hot sauce, maybe ever. This truly looked like a hot sauce for a gourmand, so I wondered how it would perform on the pedestrian fare we eat on a regular basis here.

I asked Tina from Peppermaster what sorts of food that this sauce might be best used on, and she mentioned: soup, noodles, rice, chicken, shrimp, beef, dumplings, and vietnamese spring rolls. Given my limited supply, I was able to try this on a couple of different kinds of prepared chicken and with some rice. Taking a spoonful from the jar, I saw:

The taste is quite unlike any hot sauce I can remember, and that’s a good thing. In a world filled with sauces that are all too damn similar, this one revels in its uniqueness. I never thought I would be able to pick out the taste of nearly every ingredient, but I almost could. A monumentally complex taste, the broad effect on your palate is certainly greater than the sum of its parts. The ginger is a particularly nice touch, and adds an softer element of hot to the habanero and other peppers in the sauce. At first, I didn’t think that this sauce was worthy of the 7 flames (out of 10) that the jar would have you believe, but the heat is truly cumulative. By the end of the jar, the heat had built to a nice, pleasant burn on a level that I could have enjoyed for many more meals.

Recommendation: Unless you try to swallow without tasting, you will find it difficult to NOT be impressed by this hot sauce. Despite its complexity, it seems like it would be great on as many foods as you can find to put it upon. Heck, I even liked it as a dip for my potato chips. Just make sure you get the full-sized jar, and use it liberally. This sauce is so darn good that it may have replaced the Jerk Curry as my fave Peppermaster sauce. That is…until I try the next variety.

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI