As we approach this year’s Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire, I dug up my tasting notes on this fine product from Ahrun’s Famous. It’s not entirely uncommon for us to use a product, take a bunch of pics, and then let those sit around for a bit as we try to figure out what we want to write about a particular product. For the Zombie Boogie Pineapple Habanero BBQ sauce, it was more a matter of trying it on a variety of foods to give it a fair shake since our first attempt was using it on fish…not exactly your prototypical BBQ meal.

If it wasn’t for the Jungle Jim’s show, we might now even know about Ahrun’s Famous. Aside from some stores in Illinois, their products are carried in a smattering of other states (individual shops) and some online vendors. We would love to see them modernize their website a little, if only to give the online public an easier way to learn about (and order) their products.

Ingredients: corn syrup, sugar, tomato paste, molasses, vinegar, pineapple juice, natural smoke flavoring, mustard, habanero pepper, salt, and spices

We’ll describe our first use of this sauce, being some oven-broiled BBQ mahi mahi.

We own a fish basket for our grill, but we are such noobs with it that we didn’t want to waste some good sauce (and fish) in messing around on our own learning curve with it. So, we took some fresh mahi mahi and added some lemon pepper to it, and cooked it on a low-temp broil in our oven for about 15-20 minutes.

When the fish was mostly cooked (and therefore less likely to have the BBQ sauce burn or overly caramelize), we coated the fish with BBQ sauce and gave it another 5-7 minutes in the oven. Word of warning, though. Be careful with the times depending on what type of fish you use. The mahi was a thicker fish, so that much time really worked. A thinner fish, like tilapia, might get WAY overdone if you are not careful.

After the broiling is done, serve and eat. We used a broccoli mix with a light butter sauce, and it was a nice complement to the strength of the fish’s flavor.

First impression: Love the fact that the ingredients are essentially natural. No HFCS or any other crap in it that might give you pause. Nice BBQ aroma, although it certainly doesn’t smell like it is terribly potent. Very busy label, but it works based on the name of the sauce. Thick, finely blended sauce.

Taste: At first taste, we were not impressed…but each bite made our initial impression more and more misguided. Not a terribly strong pineapple flavor (fresher pineapple rather than juice might have been better,) but enough so that you know it’s a pineapple BBQ sauce rather than a run-of-the-mill BBQ sauce. Then, the heat kicks in a bit. Wow, the pineapple is such a nice flavor complement! It ratchets the heat up to about 6.5/10, so not too overwhelming for those who might not think habanero heat might not be for them. With this sauce, the more we had of it, the better we liked it…and added more to the fish than we had coated it with initially.

We also tried this sauce with some grilled chicken breasts and even some grilled pork loin. The experience wasn’t much different on the grill, but the heat does mellow the flavor more than in the oven. It’s still a little sweeter than we normally eat for our normal BBQ sauce, but we can’t help but enjoy the pineapple twist that the flavor adds to the meat.

Overall recommendation: A decent BBQ sauce from Ahrun’s Famous, and one that we would certainly buy again. As we showed in our efforts, you can use it on more than just your average grill fare. A little on the sweeter side of the spectrum, but nicely balanced with the habanero. We give our thumbs-up to this one. Good stuff.