Up until now, we here at the HZOB haven’t had too much to say about BBQ sauce. The fact is, that we’ve been generally so disenchanted with anything store-bought which has been essentially glorified ketchup with smoke flavoring that we’ve avoided the topic altogether. Even BBQ sauces that have claimed to be spicy have sorely lacked any true chilehead appeal and usually just have a modicum of cayenne pepper in them to make them spicy enough to attempt to please the non-chilehead crowd.

OK, beloved chileheads…wake up and smell the BBQ sauce. You now have a BBQ sauce that you can be proud of for your very own. What sauce is this, you ask? It’s Smokin-Hot Stuff by E.Z. Earl, courtesy of Branding Iron Foods.

E.Z. Earl himself gave us a shout and asked us if we might want to try some of his sauces and see what we thought of them. Given a chance to dispel our notions about BBQ sauces and to make some good food on our grill was all the motivation we needed, so we eagerly said yes and waited for the box to arrive at our doorstep.

Looking at the bottle, we scanned the ingredients list and saw this:

Ingredients: pure white vinegar, filtered water, diced tomatoes in juice, English-Style Worcester sauce (no anchovies), secret blend of 12 natural herbs & spices, Oregon clover honey, concentrated lemon juice, x-hot horseradish, salt, natural hickory smoke, precooked food starch, hot chili extract, natural Xanthan (as stabilizer)

We took a look at the sauce and saw a fairly standard did a few initial taste tests. Consistency-wise, the sauce is pretty much as you might expect from a BBQ sauce. It’s red, fairly thick (compared to many sauces we use, anyway), and appears to be a pretty evenly mixed sauce. A gentle whiff at the top of the jar also reveals a very BBQ-ish scent (hickory smoke) but with a distinctive chile pepper overtone as well. The thought that this might finally be a sauce that would be hot & spicy enough to really enjoy made us pour out a dollop of sauce right onto our hands which we quickly jammed in our mouths to taste.

Wow. We stood there, mouths agape, after trying this sauce. At first, the smoky taste spread across our tongues very much akin to other BBQ sauces we’ve tried…but this had a taste which really paid homage to the quality ingredients with which it’s made. Smoky and tomato-ey, with a hint of sweetness, it had a following taste which was chile pepper laden and spicy.

And then the heat came. Whoa!

This is supposed to be the milder of the two BBQ sauces that Earl makes, and we never thought milder would pack this much heat. Depending on your heat tolerance, this sauce easily clocks in at no less than a 7/10 on the heat scale…and we dare say that it goes up a tad the more you eat.

We just had to try this on some food, so we decided to give it a little test-drive for a few meals. Used as a condiment on burgers and as a dipping sauce for chicken fingers, you’d be hard-pressed to find a BBQ sauce that combines heat & flavor so well as this. This milder sauce had Joe sucking a little wind and reaching for his drink more than a few times after using it liberally to dunk his french fries into with dinner one evening. This sauce just had to be able to do more, and we needed to find a way to cook up a little meat to test it out as well. We made a trip to our local grocery to select a few meats to choose from for our BBQ feast. We settled on making some boneless, skinless chicken breasts which we decided to oven-roast. Had the weather been a little more cooperative, we might have decided to use our grill…but we made do with our oven just fine. Earl suggested we soak the chicken in the BBQ sauce as a marinade overnight, which is what we did, and it looked like this going into our fridge:

After getting the chicken out of the fridge, we unwrapped it and got it ready to head into the oven. Setting the temp. to about 375 degrees, we let the chicken cook for about 45 minutes or so. A couple of notes on cooking, though. Cooking in this way makes a lot of chicken juice, which dilutes the sauce. We used a turkey baster to remove the excess chicken juice and re-coated the chicken with some of the BBQ sauce about two-thirds of the way through cooking. Coming out of the oven, this was our chicken:

We may have cooked it a few minutes too long, but it was still pretty good. Look at this closeup of the meat:

We felt that the oven-roasting may have mellowed the heat just a smidge, but it did a lot for the flavor. Whether it was the added component of the cooked chicken or not, the final product had a deeper, richer flavor which still had enough to heat to catch and maintain the attention of your tastebuds with each bite. We spent some time discussing just what other meats we would need to cook to get the most out of this sauce. Thank goodness we have another bottle of sauce sitting on our shelf!

Overall recommendation: Rejoice, chileheads! You have a BBQ sauce for you! It’s not at all mild, even when compared to its sister sauce, the Blazin-Hot Stuff…which we’ll be reviewing soon as well. Despite its nice ingredients list, this is an extract BBQ sauce. However, unlike other sauces that use extract, this sauce doesn’t contain a discernable chemical taste that extract sauces often have. It has a crisp, chile pepper taste that simply annihilates most of its competition when it comes to the combo of heat and flavor. There certainly aren’t any mass-produced sauces that could hold a candle to this sauce, in any way. We loved using this sauce, and recommend you try it for yourself. Just remember that it packs some heat…but that’s a good thing. Enjoy!

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