My first product review in a while. DAMN, but it’s good to write something on this blog for a change.

My first review upon my return from my job-hell hiatus is the Thai Fuzion spicy & sweet hot sauce, manufactured for Caprine’s Cuisine out of Huntington Beach, CA. This sauce comes in both a “sweet” and “spicy” version, so this is the spicier of the two…which is good for this reviewer, anyway. If you are at all like me when it comes to Oriental food (Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and others,) you may find it a challenge to find ways to make your food as spicy as you like it. Some of the more commonly used peppers (such as chipotle and habanero) do not always meld well with these sorts of dishes, so why make a dish with an off-balance taste merely for the sake of making it hot & spicy? A little sweetness is sometimes the trick, so enter this sauce. As for what it has in it, you find:

Ingredients: water, sugar, lime juice, cilantro, salt, sesame seed oil, thai chili seasonings, oyster extractives, vinegar, corn starch, wheat flour, caramel color, and natural flavors.

It passes the eye test for the absence of HFCS or any other obvious undesirables in its ingredients to be sure. The labeling is simple, professional, and has at least a modicum of shelf appeal. You get a 5.5 ounce bottle of sauce with a very sweet aroma, moderately thick, and easily pours from the bottle.

I eat a fair amount of Chinese and Vietnamese food, so I carried this bottle around with me for about a week just to test out its taste and utility in a couple of different dishes.

Taste: The flavor sorta hit me in waves. The initial taste is a bit sweet, although more purely sugary sweet as opposed to a fruit-based sweetness. After that tip-of-the-tongue sweetness fades, you get the full-force of the Thai chilis…which have a bit of a “grainy” mouth feel to them. The heat, despite the sauce’s moniker of spicy, is still medium at best, perhaps 5/10 or so. The aftertaste is strong on the vinegar, but not bitterly so. The sauce flavor is not totally balanced, but the overall profile makes it tasty even right out of the bottle.

This sauce has some pretty outstanding utility, as the maker’s suggestions include using it on/with wontons, egg rolls, gyoza, noodles, rice, pizza, sushi, hot wings, shrimp cocktail, tofu, chicken, beef, seafood and even vegetables. I had no idea that gyoza are essentially Japanese pot stickers, but when I tried them with this sauce…wow, great flavor addition to those. As a dipping sauce, this product is amazingly tasty. I liked it on everything from your garden-variety eggrolls to french fries to chicken nuggets. The flavor can get lost in dishes with strong-flavored sauces, so those did not fare so well with this sauce. However, simple starches like rice and veggies were MUCH better with this sauce mixed into them. If you like the flavor of the base sauce, finding the right usage for it is the fun part.

Overall recommendation: Hot sauces that mix well with Oriental foods are hard to come by, so add Thai Fuzion to your list of ones to have in which to dip your eggrolls and wontons. The flavor, while not perfectly balanced, is nonetheless tasty and has a myriad of uses which are not limited to your fave Chinese dishes. Being the chilehead that I am, I could envision a spicier version of this sauce that I would like, but this sauce is a good start. Enjoy!