swampscum.jpgLouisiana-style hot sauces really bring back a sense of nostalgia for me, and bring me back to some of my early roots as a chilehead. Back as an impressionable eighteen year-old, I set off for my first year of college at Tulane University in New Orleans. I had already established a bit of a taste for spicier food, but that was limited to cayenne pepper and the rare bottle of Tabasco sauce I could convince my mother to keep in the cupboard for my own personal usage.

There are still parts of my freshman year of college that I don’t remember (although my liver probably remembers the abuse), but the one thing I remember for sure was being introduced to a whole new world of Cajun and Creole cuisine. Gumbo. Red beans & rice…the real stuff, not the carp that you get from Popeye’s chicken. Étouffées, of many varieties. Jambalaya. Po-boys made New Orleans-style. Crawfish boils. The list goes on and on. The one thing that seemed to go with them like jelly with peanut butter was Louisiana-style hot sauce.

Stuff like Trappey’s, Crystal, Tabasco, and Louisiana Hot Sauce is what has lingered in my memory, since most of my foods were lovingly sprinkled with one of those sauces. Since then, I’ve tried quite a few sauces in the same sorta style, but few have distinguished themselves enough to be worth buying more than once or twice. When we received an email from Larry Jorgensen of Mossy Bayou Foods, it seemed like a perfect opportunity for me to try a sauce that might harken back to some of my hot sauce “roots,” so to speak.

This sauce arrived recently, along with some other products from Mossy Bayou, and I wasted no time in getting this into heavy rotation in a variety of meals.

Ingredients: peppers, vinegar, salt, molasses, natural flavoring, caramel color

It’s a bit darker than your average Louisiana-style sauce, and turns out to be a bit greener than the traditional red vinegar-based sauces. With the shiny metallic label, it definitely sticks out from other sauces on the shelf. When you remove the cap and take a quick sniff of the aroma, you can detect the overwhelming smokiness that this sauce has. I’ve not been a fan of sauces whose bottles use that plastic nipple flow-restrictor, so I just peeled it off to use the sauce in the amounts I desired.

Taste: Smoky, smoky, and more smoky. You might at first think that you are eating a chipotle sauce with the earthy taste that this sauce has, but it is tempered by the gentle sweetness of the molasses. It definitely does not possess the vinegary tartness of many Louisiana-style sauces, and I really liked that. For heat, it’s fairly middle-of-the-road…perhaps a 4/10 for overall hotness. This is a sauce which seems to value flavor over heat. I’m not sure what peppers are used because of the intense smoky flavor, but it seems to have the mouth feel of cayenne or tabasco chiles.

I was impressed with the utility that this sauce had, even with the dominant smoky-sweetness to its taste that it has. I tried it with some store-bought gumbo just to embellish the sauce’s thematic style, and the sauce added its characteristic flavor quite nicely. With its resemblance to chipotle, you may also want to try this sauce with your favorite Mexican or Tex-Mex dish as well. I was just as happy with it over my grilled chicken breast, and was even motivated enough to sop of the extra hot sauce that was left over on my plate after I had scarfed down the meat. The sauce is painfully thin, so keep that in mind when you cook with it.

Overall recommendation: Finally, a Louisiana-style sauce you can use on more than just gumbo and jambalaya! While it seems kinda simple to add molasses to a basic sauce, this sauce does it with aplomb. You can just as easily save it for your favorite Cajun dish or generously spray it over your pedestrian dinner fare to give it lots of smoky-good flavor. Sure, the sauce seems to be a bit more green than many others on the market…but don’t knock the color ’til you try it. I’m glad that I did, so you’ll have to judge for yourself. Enjoy!

Swamp Scum Hot Sauce by Mossy Bayou Foods

Award winning! Louisiana Style hot sauce with a delicious smoke flavor.

1st Place Winner – 2002 National competition conducted by Chile Pepper Magazine.
2nd Place Winner – People’s Choice Award, 2003 Zesty Food Show, Ft. Worth, Texas.

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