Some sauces simply aren’t what you think they are going to be.

I remember trying this sauce for the first time at the Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire show, and being please albeit a little bit puzzled by it. Was it a hot sauce, a dessert sauce, a fruit sauce, or some combination of the bunch? With fruit-based hot sauces, it can be tough to really know. Some are really, really fruity or overly sweet, but few of them have seemingly ever been able to balance out the chile peppers and fruit to make it destined for more than just a dessert topping for chileheads.

Until this sauce, that is.

For one thing, there doesn’t seem to be that many apple hot sauces out there these days…certainly not ones made with green apples, which is a personal fave of mine. To get an idea of what this sauce was suggested to do, here is the description as penned by the folks at Big Dawg Salsa:

An amazing complex flavor that begins with the taste of Fresh Green Apples chased with the sweetness of Brown Sugar and a dusting of Cinnamon. Topped off with Habaneros for the “chilehead” lover in all of us.

Like Moms Fresh Apple Pie

Awesome on Pork, Chicken, and good old fashioned Vanilla Ice Cream. Great poured over cream cheese and served with crackers. Can’t miss as a marinade before grilling.

Seemed to be an emphasis on dessert, but I was anxious to what else I could get this sauce to compliment. Checking out its ingredients, I saw:

Ingredients: green apples, apple cider vinegar, brown sugar, habanero peppers, jalapeno peppers, red onions, fresh squeezed lime, chipotle flakes, garlic, ground cinnamon, sea salt, and other spices

Totally and completely natural…a major thumbs-up for this sauce. Darrell Fitch of Big Dawg Salsa had told us about the painstaking way that they peel and cook their apples for this sauce and how they combine that mixture with the peppers to get it just right. Hard to appreciate that from a list on the side of the bottle, but it’s worth mentioning to give an idea of how much care is taken in putting this particular sauce together.

First impression: Like the Drooling Mustard sauce I reviewed earlier, this sauce also has that cool wax seal that makes you think that you’re opening a collectible when you crack into the bottle. That, plus the original art as penned by Darrell himself, make this a unique sauce just on the outside. The smell I detect is mostly apple but with undertones of the peppers and of cinnamon. Not much in the way of a vinegary smell to me, but it does have that almost moist, sweetness to it that must be the brown sugar also. It’s moderately thick, but well-blended, and pours easily and amply from the bottle.

Taste: A nice, balanced flavor with this sauce. The apple and sugar are the most up-front elements of this sauce, but you really taste the after-effects of the peppers as the heat lingers a bit after the sweetness fades. Sweetness aside, the heat with this sauce is pretty tangible…perhaps a 6.5/10 on my personal heat scale. What’s so cool about this sauce is being able to taste everything that’s in it…from the apples to the sugar to the peppers to spices. I think I could actually spoon this right out of the bottle and eat it. Of course, I’m a little weird that way too.

I took the opportunity to try this sauce, as suggested, with both chicken and pork. An attempt was made to try it with red meats, but one taste had me convinced that its strength lay with the lighter meats. Not even as used for a marinade, I simply for this sauce over baked version of the lighter meats and chowed down. This is where this sauce showed itself as a little bit of chameleon, as it seemed to really blend well like more of a pepper sauce with meat, yet when used on sweet stuff like ice cream or other desserts, it was more like a fruity sauce. Perhaps it was all in my mind, but I liked that aspect of the sauce a great deal. I gave it a try in some other ‘regular’ foods just to see how it would affect the flavor, and the sweet apple was a little much in most other foods or seemed to make the flavor a little “off.” I did enjoy this as an add to many veggie sides, as it gave some schwerve to some otherwise boring side dishes, but it was hit-or-miss depending on the meal.

Overall recommendation: Whether you want to really add a little special spicy something to your dessert or give some unique habanero-apple flavor to the main dish, this hot sauce from Big Dawg Salsa should be on your shelf. A great balance of flavor and heat, it will certainly have enough of both to please the purists from any angle. Sure, it’s a little smoky for some desserts…but you can go trial-and-error until you find the best combinations without too much trouble. It may not fit the mold of an “everyday” hot sauce, but it’s good enough that you may at least try to use it every day. A great sauce. Enjoy!

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