Ever since my order of Danny Cash hot sauces arrived a few weeks ago (with the Naga Sabi bomb included), I have been looking forward to reviewing one of these sauces. My exposure to actually tasting these sauces in the past has mostly been at trade shows like ZestFest, so it was nice to have a bottle of my very own to be able to pour it liberally over lots of stuff to give it the official review process.

For one thing, I can say that I do like the labels quite a bit. Now the folks at DC have a couple of other label styles, some for private label items, but this is the one I think of when I hear about these products. It’s a clean, glossy label with the fiery motorcycle graphics that will look good either on your shelf for display or in heavy rotation in your hot sauce supply at home. I have been wanting to review a good cayenne-based sauce for a while now, and this one fit the bill. Looking at the ingredients list, you can see:

Ingredients: red cayenne and red habanero chile peppers, fresh garlic, fresh cracked black pepper, vinegar, fresh sea salt

Not a gourmet list by any means, but it’s straightforward with a lot of the basics you need for a solid hot sauce. Even though habanero peppers are on the list, this sauce is sold as a cayenne sauce. So, it was going to be interesting to see just how much of the taste was cayenne vs. habanero, and how the heat was for this sauce. I carried this bottle of sauce around with me for about two weeks, so I definitely gave it lots of tries in different foods, not to mention sharing it with everyone who was willing to try it. Here’s my take on it…

First impression: Besides the look I mentioned above, this sauce has a spicy aroma to it. By spicy, I don’t necessarily mean hot or even pepper-laden. While there is the scent of capsicum (likely the cayenne), you really get a good whiff of the garlic and black pepper from the bottle. I liked that the vinegar scent is not overwhelming, but it is at least noticeable…and not an uncommon finding in many cayenne sauces.

For consistency, it’s fairly thin. This is one sauce that needs the bottle nipple to keep too much sauce pour-age from escaping at any given usage. While being a pretty homogeneous sauce (in that it doesn’t separate too much on non-use), you can see the spices and fine pepper bits within the sauce itself. For example, this splosh shows you:

Taste: Chuk Hell’s review of this sauce a few months ago sums up the straight taste pretty nicely, “What a wonderful flavor!” The sauce is tasty enough to lick from your fingers, and I know I did so on more than one occasion. Much to my enjoyment, it has lots of cayenne flavor with just enough habanero for additional flavor without the overwhelming heat. DC rates this sauce at about a 4/10 for heat, but I’ll go out on a limb and call it a 5/10, especially if you eat enough of it in one sitting.

As for uses, there are quite a few. I won’t list them all here, but there were few foods that I tried that failed to taste better with the addition of a liberal amount of this sauce. Soups and stews are ideal choices, as the liquidity of this sauce blends in seamlessly and the pepper taste adds a little extra oomph to every serving. Testament to this sauce’s usefulness was that I was able to get many non hot sauce-eaters at work to eat it with their food…and each person, to a head, liked it and was pleased by the combination of heat & flavor.

One tasting note that I need to mention, though. One or two tasters, Linda being one of them, felt the sauce was a little salty. I tried it several times, and didn’t think so. I can definitely taste the salt, and I’m not sure if the fresh sea salt has a different taste profile and/or potency than regular ol’ table salt. It’s noticeable, but not detracting. Depending on your salt sensitivity, your mileage may vary.

Overall recommendation: Cayenne lovers will find a treat with this sauce. It does have that Louisiana hot sauce taste and feel to it, but it’s done better than most of those. With medium heat and lots of flavor, it has wide utility and goes quite well with almost everything you might want to try it upon. My testament to that is that there is nary a drop left of this bottle, and any sauce I consume at this accelerated rate is proof-positive that I like it well enough to recommend it to others. Get a bottle of your own and see if you agree with me. Enjoy!

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