I saw this bottle of hot sauce while traveling last year, and was inspired to bring it home. After years of collecting and buying a lot of hot sauce, I have learned how to spot the clones. You know the clones…those hot sauces with roughly the same ingredients that come in bottles with all sorts of different labels. Nowadays, I’m just a lot more picky when I’m hunting for new stuff. That said, Marie Sharp’s hot sauces have been a nice surprise for me overall. After doing a review recently on her Fiery Hot Habanero Sauce, I thought this might be a good follow-up to it, not to mention one that had the potential to be a bit different. Looking at its ingredients, I beheld this:

Ingredients: select yellow habanero peppers, grapefruit pulp, onions, key lime juice, vinegar, garlic, and salt

A fairly standard list to me, but with the addition of grapefruit pulp and key lime (rather than regular lime) juice to the mix. Also, it was unusual to see yellow habs, but I was unsure if this would just be a color change or whether or not the flavor of the yellows might really be different than the reds & oranges. I went to the Marie Sharp website to see their description of this sauce:

This special sauce was created in answer to some suggestions from our local friends and it’s made by using yellow Habanero peppers, orange (correction, grapefruit) pulps, fresh vegetables, and spices. The level of hotness is similar to our “HOT” and the added citrus flavor enhances much more of the Habanero flavor.

Well, I wasn’t sure that I was buying into how much the citrus flavor would enhance the habanero, but I was willing to give it a try to test the theory.

First impression: Well, you can see above what I saw when I poured out a little bit of this sauce onto a plate. It’s a bright yellow dollop sauce that was pulp-laden, slightly chunky, and required removing the plastic flow-inhibitor on the bottle just to get some out. It’s smell was an odd odor combination of habanero and grapefruit that wasn’t altogether appealing. It actually looked a little like some of the pepper jams I’ve tried recently if you heated them up to be a little less viscous.

Taste: Tasting this one was a little bit of an odd experience, as it seemed to be a little different to me each time I tried it over the space of a few weeks. In fact, it’s almost like it oxidized a little with exposure to air as I feel the flavor profile deteriorated over time. It definitely has a grapefruit-habanero bent to it, but those elements are so powerful that I can scarcely taste anything else. There’s a hint of the key lime tartness, but that’s about it. Heatwise, I’d give it about a 6-7/10 or so…which obviously reflects the diluting of the habanero heat with the citrus elements in the sauce.

To say this sauce has limited usefulness is giving it too much credit. I really struggled to find food combinations that would bring out the best aspects of this sauce. I was pretty much limited to chicken and fish dishes, particularly ones that didn’t have other strong flavors where this sauce would compete for taste. It was a downright poor choice in my usual soups & stews, as the citrus tartness created an weird taste that I didn’t much like. As a dipping sauce or condiment, it had few food choices that complimented it well. As I mentioned above, the taste seemed to get more tart and acrid as time went by, and part of that may be my fault. I didn’t keep this sauce refrigerated the whole time (which I usually don’t with habanero sauces), and the warm temperatures may have wreaked a little havoc with the taste. Whatever happened, it wasn’t a sauce that I thought had too many good taste combinations.

Overall recommendation: It may sound like I didn’t like this sauce all that much…and that would be pretty accurate. There have been relatively few sauces I’ve tried over the past year or so that I’ve given a “thumbs-down” to, but this one is one of those. Whether or not I got a bad bottle, ruined it myself, or that the taste really is how I have described it, this doesn’t change the fact that this sauce’s off-kilter taste is a tough one to pair up with foods. I had a few other people try this sauce, and reviews from them were mixed as well.

I’m sure there’s an market for this sauce out there, and people who like it. I’m just not one of them. Try it for yourself and make your own call on it.