This our third hot sauce review from the folks at Urban Chefs. After tasting this sauce, and looking at most of the others, one thing becomes pretty obvious.

These aren’t complicated sauces.

There are no shortage of sauces out there with long ingredients lists. Fancy fru-fru stuff, thickening agents (yes you, xantham gum), and preservatives may be parts of these lists as well. Well, you’ll find no such extraneous stuff in the Urban Chef’s sauces. For example, their Old School hot sauce has this:

Ingredients: cayenne chile pepper, habanero chile pepper, distilled vinegar

It doesn’t get much simpler than that. Whether this sauce tastes good or whether it’s more or less just a glorified pepper mash remained to be seen. The proof, so to speak, is in the bottle.

First impression: Previously-described label issues with this bottle, but at least I liked the deeper red color to this one. Nice pepper-y aroma, but the vinegar content is fairly obvious. What I really like about this sauce is the consistency…lots of pepper mash with enough viscosity to stick to food or pour out liberally. No nipple on this bottle, so pouring is rather easy.

Taste: Pure pepper taste that is a pretty good balance of cayenne and habanero. Not overly tart, it is in fact a little bit sweet-tasting…which I didn’t expect. Pepper sauces with more than one pepper featured can be tough to balance, but I liked the overall taste for this one, especially with its cayenne flavor. The heat is medium hot, perhaps around 7/10, and is fairly manageable for most chileheads. There is some cumulative heat buildup is you eat enough of it, but not at the expense of flavor.

This sauce was great both on, and mixed into, a variety of food choices. I was seen many days at work slathering it like ketchup on sandwiches and a variety of cooked meat, and loved it each and every time. For my almost-daily chili fix, it was better add for its great pepper flavor than heat. It would be more difficult for me to list the foods that it didn’t go well with than those it did, and that’s my glowing endorsement.

Overall recommendation: As mentioned above, I adore the simplicity of this sauce. Recently, I recommended this sauce for someone with a lot of food allergies who was desperately looking for a hot sauce without a lot of the allergens that she couldn’t tolerate. Besides that, many people are just plain sensitive to a lot of garlic and onions in certain sauces, and this one has none of those. It is pure chile pepper goodness with a vinegar base, and is fairly versatile for any dish where you’d want to use habanero & cayenne flavor. I call this a K.I.S.S. sauce, meaning Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simple seldom tastes this good, so try some for yourself. Enjoy!

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