This sauce marks the first sauce we’ve reviewed by the great folks at Urban Chefs. Anthony Frazier, head Urban Chef, gifted us with a few bottles of his hot sauces to try out for a while. This one looked really interesting because one of the main ingredients is the Lemon Drop pepper.

To wax botanical for a moment, the Lemon Drop pepper is really kinda cool. We consulted some of our online sources to learn a little more about this member of capsicum baccatum. The Chileman’s site refers to this pepper as aji lemon drop, and says this information about it:

AJI LEMON DROP
This terrifically hot, citrus-flavored pepper is a popular seasoning pepper in Peru where it is known as ‘Kellu Uchu’. It is also known in the western world as ‘Hot lemon’ or ‘Lemon Drop’. The bright yellow, crinkled, cone-shaped fruits are about 2-1/2″ long and 1/2″ wide and mature from green to yellow approximately 100 days after transplanting (Long season) have less seeds than the average pepper, containing than 15 seeds on average. They plant is vine like typically reaching a height of about 3 ft. Like other baccatum species this pepper was practically unknown in the West until the early 1990s, but are now gaining wide scale popularity.

Graeme Caselton’s UK Chile-head site, which is a great resource has this to say about the lemon drop pepper:

Lemon Drop: An Aji variety from Brazil. Golden yellow colour with smaller sized peppers than the Peruvian Aji’s. (Capsicum baccatum). Plant has tiny white flowers with clear yellowish green spots. Very hot.

The pepper is gorgeous (trust me), and yet you also don’t see it in a lot of hot sauces currently on the market. Hopefully, sauces like this will change that in the time to come! Here’s the simple ingredients list:

Ingredients: cayenne chile pepper, lemon drop chile pepper, vinegar

Doesn’t get much simpler than that, huh? Unusual to see a sauce that doesn’t have any kind of spice in it…not even salt. Would that make any difference? Tasting would tell.

First Impression: First things first. About the bottle, the label graphics need a little work. A few of the bottles we have are obviously made with newer graphics and a nice label, and this sauce is desperately in need of a face-lift. A glossier label and less pixelation would make this look just dreamy. So much of the concern about the outside was alleviated after I opened the bottle. This sauce has one of the neater aromas I’ve come across recently. Besides the obvious overtones of the vinegar, the lemon drop makes it smell a lot like…lemons, actually. Very fragrant and pleasant. Doing the plate display thing as usual, I doled out my usual dollop of sauce to take a closer look:

Although it looks like the sauce is a little runny with vinegar from this photo, it is really pretty well-blended and mildly thick. It has more than enough viscosity to stick to a wide variety of foods, yet pours quite easily from the bottle. If it tastes half as good as it smells, then this sauce will work wonders.

Taste: Despite the presence of cayenne in this sauce, it’s not a dominant taste. The lemon drop pepper is the show in this one, folks! This sauce is definitely delicious. It’s kinda fruity but not sweet, and that is a different sorta combo than I’m used to tasting. Not only that, but it’s a little tart…although some of that certainly comes from the vinegar, which is quite prominent. Not sure if it’s a mind trick or not, but I kept expecting this to taste a little like lemons because of the aroma. The cayenne flavor is understated, but you mostly get a little a little heat. Speaking of heat, this sauce is what I’d call medium-hot, perhaps a 7/10. Very manageable and do-able in a wide variety of meal choices.

This sauce did well with a variety of foods, but I simply loved it slathered over whatever I was eating. From chicken to fish to steamed veggies, this sauce was a great addition. Mixing it into foods mellows the tartness, but doesn’t adversely affect the taste at all. Two foods in particular were big hits with this sauce. The first was chicken soup. Chicken soup can be rather unadventurous, but me and a co-worker of mine doused our lunchtime chicken soup with a few teaspoons of this, and it was a heavenly combination. Another good choice was with Chinese food. Normally I don’t use cayenne-enhanced sauces with Chinese food, but this sauce was great over Wasabi-chicken and Red curry flank steak with rice. The sauce really gives a nice melange of flavor and adds just the right amount of heat. It’s a unique enough sauce flavor that your mileage may truly vary, but you’ll have a lot of fun in trying to pair this sauce with your own entree choices.

Overall recommendation: Proof positive that a simple combination can work just as good as the gourmet sauces out there, The Legacy hot sauce has its mojo goin’ on! What would otherwise be a boring cayenne sauce is spruced up by the lemon drop pepper to give a flavorful hot sauce with medium heat that has a decent amount of versatility. Yeah, its label needs a face-lift…but who cares? Try the sauce and turn the bottle around if you have to do so. You’ll likely think so well of the sauce that it wouldn’t matter if it came in a cologne jar. Yes, it’s that good. Enjoy!

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