This isn’t exactly a hot sauce review, but when you have a chance to try this one for yourself, you’ll say “Who cares?”

(Author’s note: While the sauce I reviewed is no longer marketed under the name Chocolate Glow, it is now available with the name Chocolate Passion. This will explain the discrepancy between the picture and review title.)

Chocolate and chile peppers seem to go as well together as peanut butter and jelly, when made just right. Making it more or less spicy is a matter of personal preference, but when chocolate is involved it’s hard to really go wrong. I’ve heard some non-chileheads say things like, “How could you ruin perfectly good chocolate by making it spicy?!”

Those people have quite obviously never tried this chocolate sauce. Just have one taste and you’ll have a better understanding. Looking at the sauce’s description from the Peppermaster website:

I have reduced the heat of our burning hot ‘Chili Chocolate’ to that of a gentle, warm glow by extracting the essence of MILDER CHILI PEPPERS, and marrying it to this delightful concoction of Fair Trade certified 70% Callebaut dark chocolate, Tahitian vanilla and Fair Trade certified organic espresso.

It’s difficult to not love this chocolate, it’s got a surprising tingle of heat that enhances ice cream, cheesecake or fresh fruit.

A review of the amazing list of ingredients shows:

Ingredients: sugar, glucose, cream (35%mf), corn syrup, unsweetened chocolate, fresh pepper liquor, butter (salt-free), espresso (spring water, Guatemala dark coffee), pure Tahitian vanilla extract

My goodness, what’s not to like from that list? Unless you’re counting calories, that is. Maybe spicy chocolate sauce has less calories then regular chocolate sauce. In my universe, that’s the way it should be.

First impression: Well, it looks and smells a whole lot like chocolate sauce…no mystery there. It’s thick enough such that it’s more like fudge that like Hersheys’ syrup. You need to spoon it out of the jar, which I happily did.

Taste: Wow, the superlatives fail me here. This sauce is really amazingly good. Against my better judgement, I decided to share microscopic samples of it at work to get a wider opinion of this sauce. Each person who tried it, to a head, was surprised at how good the chocolate was. These are the same people who are consistently skeptical of anything I have them taste because they’ve been burned by me before. Literally. This time, they were asking for more.

My official word is that it’s a great chocolate sauce with just enough heat to tingle on your tongue a little. Roughly a 1/10 for heat. Not much to a chilehead, but just perfect for just about everyone else. I mixed a small amount into my younger son’s milk (ain’t I a stinker?) and he downed his chile-chocolate milk without the slightest hesitation. My only other use with this was with ice cream, and it was just as great with that as it was spooned out of the bottle. I can just imagine (and salivate as well) at how good it would be with just about any other dessert option.

Overall recommendation: Hot fudge will simply never be the same now that I know this sauce exists. Whether it’s barely hot enough to notice pales in comparison to how well this chocolate goes with just about everything. I think I’ll be ready to move on to the Chili Chocolate next, but for now I’ll spend my time trying to get every last molecule of spicy chocolate out of my little sample jar. I think Beldar of the Coneheads summed it up just fine when he said:

My thoughts exactly. Enjoy!