Race City Sauce Works is new to us…well, at least their products are. Chad Lowcock of RCSW has been a fellow competitor in our Chileheads fantasy baseball league over the past season, so we are worthy adversaries during the baseball season. However, when not immersed in statistics, Chad & co. make some darn good products. I picked this one, the Lucky Dog Smokey Habanero Honey Mustard, to try out at this past Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire show. As I have stated numerous times when reviewing them, I am a big fan of spicy mustard. That is, I am a fan when they’re spicy enough to suit my taste. I had high hopes after looking at this list of ingredients that this mustard would be one of those:

Ingredients: prepared mustard, Race City Sauce Works hot sauce, honey, spices, vinegar, water, smoked habanero peppers, vegetable oil, salt, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika

At its core, this mustard does not reinvent the wheel. Some regular mustard, hot sauce, and a bunch of other spices make up the core of this mustard,

First impression: There are things I like (and don’t like) in my first perusal of this sauce. For one, it would probably behoove them to list the ingredients in their “Race City Sauce Works hot sauce” for both transparency in their ingredients listing and to keep the FDA from giving them a hard time about an ingredient which is actually composed of other stuff. Also, I would like to see this sauce in more of a jar than a five-ounce woozie bottle. Most people think of mustard as coming in a jar (or at least a different-shaped bottle), so put it in a container big enough to hold enough of it and let no one mistake it for a run-of-the-mill hot sauce. It has a reddish-brown color unlike most other mustards I have seen, but is a little heavy on the vinegar aroma. Nice professional-looking glossy label which pays homage to the company’s namesake. It’s a bit thick, and it took quite a few bottle-shakes to dislodge a glob of it for my initial tasting.

Taste: Any misgivings I may have had up until I tasted it was all put to rest thereafter. This mustard sauce is really all that (and the proverbial bag o’ chips.) My dollop poured out that I tried really had that honey taste, but followed by a habanero blaze. When I say blaze, I do mean it’s hot. Despite its voluminous heat (about 8/10 or so), it’s no slouch on flavor either. The more I tried, the more I liked it…even if I was sucking wind with each passing bite.

As for uses, there was nothing truly innovative I came up with for using this mustard. Obviously, it’s a spicy condiment of the highest order for sandwiches and similar lunch-time fare. I also found it to be good with both grilled chicken as a dipping sauce, and with sausage and hot dogs smeared right over the top. I actually found this a quite tasty addition to egg scrambles as well, since eggs can be some of the most challenging food to make spicy. With its relatively strong heat level, a little goes a long with each meal to be sure.

Overall recommendation: I love those mustards which don’t remind you with each bite that they are really mustard-y. Yeah, this sauce looks like it’s supposed to be a hot sauce…but it’s not. Sure it’s a hot and spicy mustard, but it is one of the tastiest spicy mustards I have had in quite some time. Whether you use it delicately drizzled over your hot dogs or blended into tuna salad, you can seldom go wrong with fantastic mustard. It gives me some motivation to try some other stuff from Race City Sauce Works, so stay tuned for that. Enjoy!