“Out with the old, in with the new”

Gone are the old bottles of Monty’s Fire Lizard, with an old label design and ingredients that didn’t want to stay mixed over time. Enter the NEW Monty’s Fire Lizard with a new formulation which includes a lot of what made the previous incarnation so good. Along with a new label design, courtesy of Dave Kellett of the Sheldon comic strip, Monty’s Fire Lizard hot sauce is back with a vengeance. As to the commentary of what’s inside the bottle, Monty describes the sauce as:

Monty’s Gourmet Fire Lizard Habanero Hot Sauce is a masterful blend of all natural ingredients that have come together to create a fiery treat for lovers of Louisiana style hot sauces. This hot sauce will add spice to any and all Louisiana style cooking.

The ingredients of this sauce has some of the same ingredients as the old, but some new also:

Ingredients: peppers (may contain red savina habanero ™, red rabanero), vinegar, horseradish, ginger, other spices, xanthan gum

Monty has incorporated two kinds of fresh, not ground, habanero peppers while keeping the ever-popular Red Savina in the mix. Gone is the ground annatto, which only served to provide coloring anyway. With the exception of the thickening agent (xanthan), this is an all-natural list that’s short but sweet.

First impression: After getting over how much I liked the bottle on the outside, I carefully unwrapped the cap, removed it, and took a gentle whiff of the sauce. The whiff is anything but gentle, though. This sauce simply smells potent. Not sure if it’s just the red savina or whether or not the ginger and horseradish create such a pungent aroma. Either way, I salivated at the thought of what this sauce must taste like. Pouring some out onto my sample plate for review, I saw this:

It’s well-blended, mostly homogeneous, and less thick than catsup so it pours easily from the bottle. Bits of spices are obviously floating within the hot sauce mixture.

Taste:Yowza! Hold onto your hats, folks, because this sauce has some serious shwerve to it. Either I’m terribly out of practice with red savina hot sauces or this one has a level of heat & potency not on the same par as others of its ilk. First, let me comment on the flavor. It’s a nice habanero flavor, really, and has that “full-mouth” roundness that you’d expect from a habanero sauce. However, it’s the heat that really gets your attention. Easily a 9/10 on the heat scale, the heat lingers far longer than expected. It’s almost like the heat you would expect from an extract sauce, but it’s not one of those. The heat profile seems so unusual to me from a taste that has to be the effect of the ginger and horseradish, both of which their own sort of pungent heat. Doubtful that those are from fresh sources, but you can still appreciate the flavour nonetheless.

I gave this sauce a try in quite a variety of settings. My particularly favorite use for this sauce was to liven up creamy sauces, such as fettuccine alfredo and any other noodle dish with a creamy sauce base. It takes just enough edge off the heat where you can really appreciate the flavor of the hot sauce itself. The potent heat sauce will allow for straight pour & use over food for those with the tolerance for the spicier sauces, but I did like it as a straight dipping sauce on a few occasions. It’s also great with soups and stews, and is an ideal addition for chili. In fact, I had a co-worker request that I bring this sauce to work so he could use it on something different each day.

Overall recommendation: Want a sauce that’s nearly as hot as an extract sauce but without the icky chemical taste of capsaicin oleoresin or any other extract? Well, here’s a sauce for you. Potent, spicy, and flavorful, this sauce is definitely a step up over the previous incarnation of the Fire Lizard formula and one that I enjoyed with a fair variety of food, even if in sparing amounts. On the bottle, Monty says “Enjoy the Burn!” Well, I certainly did…and you will too. Try some for yourself and feel the heat. Enjoy!