“Hot Sauce Good As Gold”

This gem was a bottle of hot sauce we picked up from our trip to ZestFest. Porky’s Gourmet Foods, out of the great state of Tennessee, makes some pretty good products…and this hot sauce, in their Bellycheer Brand, is one of the good ones they make. This was one of the ones that hooked us on one taste on a chip, so we knew that we could do so much more with it at home.

First Impression: Love the label & graphics! Not too many sauces feature a leprechaun on the bottle, but with a name like “Irish Scream”…why not? Sniffing the aroma of the sauce itself, it reminds me a little bit of steak sauce. Steak sauce on steroids, perhaps, but still a little like a steak sauce. Definitely pepper-laden, though.

Taste: An outstandingly flavored sauce, and I was able to really taste aspects of all three of the peppers used in this sauce. There’s some spices at play, which really comes across as black pepper…which I see traces of when I poured the sauce on my plate for dipping. As for the “wee bit of Irish whiskey,” I can’t say that I tasted the liquor but that may not be such a bad thing. Some sauces which use spirits find them overwhelming the sauce’s taste profile, and this sauce balances the taste rather nicely. On the heat scale, I give it about a 6/10 as it passes over my tastebuds. Very manageable.

What foods would it be best with? Alternate uses? I think I mentioned that this smelled like a steak sauce. Prophetic or not, this sauce is great on meat, whether it’s steak, fowl, or even slathered over hamburgers off the grill. I used it to make potato and macaroni salad fit for my palate, and even dipped my fries in it. How much you can use it all depends on how motivated you are to try it in a variety of foods. Oh yeah, great with soups & stews…particularly the batch of gumbo I whipped up to use it with. Yummy!

Ingredients: jalapeno, habanero, & cayenne peppers, vinegar, salt, spices, yellow 5, blue 4 and a wee bit of Irish whiskey

Overall recommendation: This is a damn fine sauce, but I have to give it a black mark for using artificial colorings in it. The ingredients list yellow 5 and blue 4, artificial dyes, as being used in this sauce…and I don’t know why. The sauce is very red, so why add blue & yellow to it? I’d give this sauce a top-notch recommendation without those things being there, and I hate to ding a sauce just for that. Even saying that, this sauce is damn good. Hot without being overly so, this sauce is a palate-pleaser regardless of how much whiskey is in it. Grab a shillelagh, some Guinness stout, and a bottle of this sauce and have a good ol’ time at your next meal.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI