Has it really been over four months since we’ve reviewed a product from the product line of CaJohns Fiery Foods? Inconceivable, I say!! Given how much these sauces have been in regular rotation here at home, it should have been easy to crank out a review at any given time. We recently got ahold of a bottle of the Killer Chipotle to round out the trilogy, so this gives me a chance to combine all the Killer sauces into one mega-review.

Without further ado (what is “ado” anyway, why shouldn’t there be any further of it?), here are those sauces and their website descriptions:

Killer Chipotle: brown sugar, vinegar, tomato paste, chipotle chiles, chile peppers, corn starch, salt, spices

It’s the hottest sauce on the planet that uses “only” Chipotle peppers. It has the sweet, smoky chipotle flavor you love, but with a killer bite! It’s an ultra hot, but without the nasty, bitter extract flavor. We have developed a process that takes an ordinary chile pepper sauce, and boosts the heat to much higher levels without the use of extracts. Lots of heat … and great taste!

Killer Cayenne: cayenne chiles, vinegar, sugar, salt, granulated garlic, lemon extract, xanthan gum

Killer Cayenne is quite possibly the hottest Louisiana-Style pepper sauce you have ever tasted! It’s an ultra hot, but without the nasty, bitter extract flavor. We have developed a process that takes an ordinary chile pepper sauce, and boosts the heat to much higher levels without the use of extracts. Lots of heat . . . and great taste!

Killer Jalapeno: jalapeno chiles, vinegar, sugar, salt, granulated garlic, lemon extract, xanthan gum

Killer Jalapeno is the hottest Jalapeno Sauce we have ever made . . . or tasted for that matter. It’s an ultra hot, but without the nasty, bitter extract flavor. We have developed a process that takes an ordinary chile pepper sauce, and boosts the heat to much higher levels without the use of extracts. Lots of heat. . . and great jalapeno taste!

First impressions: Fantastic new label style that CaJohn has with these, and are indicative of the professional looking style he has adopted for the labels of many of his sauces. See his Southwest Classic sauces for other examples of those. The sauces do pretty well in terms of consistency and pour easily from the bottles, but my bottle of the Killer Chipotle has had a little too much dried sauce which has caked in the bottle’s neck. The aroma is mostly of vinegar and chile peppers, but nothing that would indicate that they are any more potent than regular ol’ hot sauces of similar ilk.

Tasting notes:

Killer Chipotle: This one is truly a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing! While the aroma has that distinctive smoky-sweetness that you associate with that general kind of sauce, you realize after a few small tastes what a beast this sauce is. The first taste is distinctly brown sugary-sweet, with a lot of tomato. Perhaps you detect first little onset of heat…then WHAMMO! The capsaicin hits your tongue like a ton of bricks. This is hotter than any other chipotle hot sauce I have ever tried, and I was the recipient of many sessions of sucking wind as I ate…testing the limits of my learning curve with how much I dared use on or in my food. While the heat may be for real (perhaps 8/10, esp. after using a lot), so is the flavor. It’s everything you want from a chipotle sauce (earthy, smoky, sweet) but with enough heat to satisfy those diehard chileheads. It’s a perfect compliment to Mexican food. Used in moderation with tacos, burritos, or sprinkled generously over nachos, you’ll love the taste combinations. Heck, it was great with plain ol’ chile con carne as well.

Killer Cayenne: I have a weakness for cayenne sauces, especially when they’re made just right. I’ve been made a big fan of CaJohn’s Big Kick hot sauce, and this sauce seemed like it would be a more stripped-down version of that. What it lacks in complexity, it makes up for in overall taste. It does seem to be the thinnest of the three sauces, and pours quite easily from the bottle even with the restrictor cap…which I did early and often. Unlike some cayenne sauces, I actually tasted the cayenne before the bite of the vinegar, which I thought was nice. While got the hint of the garlic and salt, it truly is the cayenne flavor which is the star feature of this sauce. While it gets as spicy hot as the chipotle sauce, the onset of heat is a little more predictable and linear based upon how much you use. To me, this was a good all-purpose sauce. Anything you might use a Louisiana-style sauce with goes great with this sauce…soups, stews, rice dishes, game meats, you name it. At the time of this review, I had used more of this sauce than any of the other three. That alone is endorsement enough.

Killer Jalapeno: While I may have used more of the Killer Cayenne sauce, it’s this jalapeno sauce which has truly won over the whole sauce-consuming household. Thicker by far than the others, you may have to ditch the restrictor cap from this bottle. Even with all the vinegar in this sauce, it pretty much smells like a fresh jalapeno every time I open the sauce to use. The great thing is that the flavor matches the aroma, and there’s not much else than the jalapeno (and a little salt) that I taste when I’ve tried it straight. However, if you have ever thought that most jalapeno hot sauces didn’t pack enough of punch for you, then this is the sauce is one for you to try. It won’t take much of it to get you to sweat, and it is perhaps the hottest jalapeno sauce I’ve tried as well. Like the chipotle, it ranks about 8.5/10 for me…which is obscene for a strictly jalapeno sauce that would normally be about a 5-6/10 or so. Another hot sauce which I consider an all-purpose sauce, I couldn’t resist taking a picture or two of it with my spicy chicken pasta dinner:

One mere tablespoon was more than enough to almost completely pollute my pasta sauce with heat, but I loved each and every bite of it anyway. This is the ones sauce of these that I preferred poured over my food because I didn’t want to lose the jalapeno flavor by mixing it in. I won’t list all the different foods I tried it upon, but it was great with them all.

Overall recommendation: These sauces are aptly named with “killer” moniker, as they are certainly not for the faint of heart…or palate. Each one does homage to the pepper it is made from, yet ratchets the heat up several notches to give that capsaicin “holy ^&%$!” moment if you are silly enough to eat too much in one sitting. These have been in high rotation here ever since we received them, which is endorsement enough. They are great products and those heat-loving chileheads out there should certainly want one (or more) of them in their hot sauce repertoire for their very own consumption. Enjoy!

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI