Coming on the heels of Passow’s last review of the Mangonesian Chipotle sauce, it’s a bit ironic that my next review that was waiting in the wings was also a Tahiti Joe hot sauce. This one, the Hot Ass Devil Juice XX Hot Sauce, seemed to be a hot sauce that was either going to fall into the gimmick category and be tossed onto that pile for good, or would be the conversation-piece sauce for me for the next month.

I was hoping for the latter.

As has been my modus operandi of late, this has been one of the handful of sauces which I’ve carried around with me pretty much everywhere for the past few weeks. Actually, I’ve been a walking Tahiti Joe catalog lately, since I’ve been trying lots of his stuff…but I digress. With a big red demon on the bottle and the emblazoned words “Hot Ass” on it, I just had to make sure that this sauce was prominently displayed on the table whenever I ate.

My experience with the Tahiti Joe hot sauces has been uniformly good thus far, particularly from my last review, but some weird déjà vu hit me when I looked at the list of ingredients from this sauce:

Ingredients: aged red peppers, fresh carrots, habanero peppers, red wine vinegar, key lime juice, worcestershire, tomato juice, honey, clam juice, onions, garlic in water, spices, guar gum

I swear this list was the same as the one for the Ahi of Kahuna sauce I reviewed. Checking that list, the comparison showed the the list is roughly identical…but with the ingredients in different amounts judging by their order on the list. Before anyone thinks that I consider this a down-check, let me say that I’ve seen this before with numerous products from a single manufacturer. When you have a winning formula, sometimes mixing it up is all you need to do to make a taste suitable for every palate. Would that taste be suitable for this palate? Time will tell. The look as poured from the bottle:

This also looked fairly similar, although I have to admit that this sauce is a bit more homogeneous and less chunky than the last. A nice habanero scent is noticeable amongst the usual vinegar and vegetable overtones that are characteristic of Tahiti Joe sauces. Definitely a bit thin, it pours easily from the open-mouth bottle in rapid amounts.

Taste: Strong with tomato and Worcestershire, this sauce has a pretty pleasing taste. Unlike Passow’s comment about the clam juice, I just don’t taste it in this sauce. In fact, the clam juice has never been a taste I’ve noticed in any of the sauces from TJ that I’ve tried. It’s obviously a well-mixed sauce with a heavy vegetable component, accentuated by the red peppers and habanero. The one thing I can say is that I wouldn’t call this sauce XX Hot. On my personal heat scale, I’d give this about 7/10…and it doesn’t go much up the scale with extra amounts eaten. Iy has what I’d call a nice simmering heat which hasn’t reached full boil.

Even with the presence of strong tastes like honey, Worcestershire, and key lime, the sauce is pretty useful with a variety of foods. The heat is tolerable enough to allow most people to pour it liberally over food without fear of “the burn.” I used it as a sandwich condiment on more than one occasion, and loved it each time. It’s pretty good with soups & stews, possibly owing to the tomato component that meshes well with those sorts of dishes. It probably fared a little better on food than in, but your mileage with it may vary.

Overall recommendation: Another strong effort from the hot sauces of Tahiti Joe, this sauce might seem as merely a doppelganger of other sauces in his line…but you’d be remiss in passing judgment so quickly on this sauce. Remarkably tasty and useful in a variety of dishes, the only disappointment might be that the “XX Hot” on the bottle doesn’t quite pan out to be true. That, plus the ever-attractive idea of offering someone the opportunity to “try a little Hot Ass” on their food has to be worth its weight in gold. Hey…it worked for me! Enjoy!

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