I’ve had this little jar of goodness sitting on my shelf since ZestFest last year, and was gifted it to me in person by Chuk after he had the opportunity to wow lots of industry people with its flavor and prodigious heat. In fact, there is a pair of pictures from the post we did for our picture collection from ZestFest 2006 in which you can see the before and after snapshots of me trying the Ogoun sauce for the first time. While the jar was meant to be a sort of collectible, there was simply no way I could get away with letting this yummy container of homemade hot sauce goodness lay around forever without getting used. Well, not for more than 6 months anyway….

Initially, I thought that “Ogoun” was a made-up name from out of Chuk’s imagination. However, Chuk provided some information on a card packaged with the sauce that I found pretty interesting and imaginative. In fact, his picture is what you see to the right side of this article. So that you, the devoted readers, know who Ogoun is, here is an excerpt of the Wikipedia definintion of Ogoun:

Ogoun (or Ogun, Ogum, Ogou) is a loa and deity respectively, who presides over fire, iron, hunting politics and war. He is the patron of smiths and is usually displayed with his attributes: machete or sabre, rum and tobacco.

Ogun is the traditional warrior, similar to the spirit of Ares in Greek mythology. As such Ogun is mighty, powerful, triumphal, yet also exhibits the rage and destructiveness of the warrior whose strength and violence can turn against the community he serves.

His possessions can sometimes be violent. Those mounted by him are known to wash their hands in flaming rum without suffering from it later. They dress up in red, wave a sabre or machete, chew a cigar and demand rum in an old phrase “Gren mwe fret” (my testicles are cold). Often this rum is poured on the ground then lit and the fumes pervade the peristyle.

Well, I feel no need to dress up and shout that my cojones are cold…but I did have to try this sauce. Here you can see the jar itself after I delicately unwrapped all the paper and string from around it:

The other side commemorating the event, ZestFest, for which it was made:

Chuk did provide a basic recipe of this sauce, which is:

Ingredients: Habaneros, smoked, roasted and fresh, pineapple, brown sugar, habanero powder, fatali powder, onion, lime juice, mixture of rums, liqueur, and a secret ingredient unrevealed by its creator

Viscous, but not overly thick, this sauce has nearly the perfect consistency to me. It both pours easily and also clings to food so well that nary an extra drop should be left on your plate when you use this. The aroma is so incredibly smoky that one jar of this might fill a room if given enough time, and is the dominant thing I noticed about this sauce before I actually tasted it.

Taste: Before even knowing what this sauce was made of, I was a little afraid of it. I saw the wrath it inflicted on other people at ZestFest, and that was from fairly small amounts. That said, I approached this jar with a little bit of trepidation about how much to taste and how to use it. The straight taste is initially a little bit sweet, possibly owing to the pineapple and brown sugar, but that sweetness is just the tip of the taste-iceberg. That first bit of sweetness gives way to the all-too-familiar pepper taste of habaneros, but made better by the fact that they are the smoked variety. Most sauces I’ve had that have the level of earthy smokiness that this sauce has are chipotle sauces, but the use of smoked habaneros was both novel and tasty.

Oh yeah, did I mention it was hot? Yowza, this sauce’s heat is insidious and long-lasting. It’s not an extreme heat like a Naga Morich sauce, but it has the same heat profile as a typical habanero sauce, but with a prolonged burn that seems to intensify over time. I would give this sauce a 9.6/10 for heat, and it earns each and every point of that heat level. Despite the heat, you’d be surprised at simply how good this sauce tastes.

Mixing the sauce with food choices was more challenging than expected, partially because of the heat and partially due to that element of sweetness I mentioned earlier. I dare say it’s a better choice ON food than in, judging by using it sparingly as a dipping sauce and as a light glaze for cooked meats. Mixed into foods, it was decent in my soups, stews, and chili…but I appreciated the heat more so than the taste of the sauce. Despite this admonition, I found this hot sauce to be pretty useful on a wider variety of foods than imagined…from meats to veggies to french fries. All good!

Overall recommendation: Chuk Hell has struck gold again with this hot sauce, lovingly dedicated to the Haitian deity Ogoun. A little but sweet and a whole lot hot, this sauce will amaze with its great combination of extreme heat and flavor. Not just heat, but lingering heat that will coat, soothe, and sizzle all the way down to your stomach. If Chuk ever wants to bottle this stuff, he will undoubtedly find a lot of takers once people are willing to try this smoky habanero sauce. Good job, Chuk!

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