Hot on the tail feather’s of Devil Duck’s review of Flaming Joe’s Jerk Sauce comes my review of one of Flaming Joe’s products. I received a can of his Island Fire Tropical Fruit & Habanero Marmalade at Jungle Jim’s and I will say that he’s hit a home run with this one.

Flaming Joe’s Island Fire Tropical Fruit & Habanero Marmalade Ingredients: Sugar, pineapple with juice, mandarin oranges (orange segments, water, sugar), lemon juice, Habaneros, Jalapenos, pectin, dried green mango, dehydrated orange & lemon zest.

This British style marmalade (not to be confused with Marmaduke) is just the thing to add zing to your favorite breakfast meals! Generally I used it on waffles (regular not Belgium), and toast but found the really treat to be slathering on top of cheese blintzes. The combo was absolutely heavenly.

So let’s dig in and do the taste rundown! The pineapple is the overarching flavor that hits first then the orange and lemon zest arrives. Although it’s low on the list, orange and lemon zest tends to be quite powerful and gives this concoction the needed bitter push into the British style range. But it’s not overly bitter (god, I hate overly bitter) which is a very good thing. Up next comes the mandarin oranges (or midget oranges as I call them) which, along with mango, are a guilty pleasure for me.

It’s a little difficult to pinpoint the Habanero taste because this product is so fruity to begin with. I do detect the taste of the Jalapenos though which combine with the slightly sour taste of the green mangos. To round the tastes off the orange and lemon zest crop back up slightly and trail off into the morning sunrise.

The heat here is a nice mellow build from mild to low medium. There’s a slight middle/front of the tongue burn that ends up spreading to the back of the throat. Nice and nothing insane either. Just enough to let you know it’s there and not enough to make you do the famed “air suck”. What a perfect addition for a well balanced breakfast!

Taste: 9, Heat: 4

Our pals over at Zane and Zack’s World Famous Honey Company are at it again! Last time I had the pleasure of reviewing two of their gourmet sauces and now I get to do it again but with a slight twist. Not only did I receive their new gourmet sauce, Tina’s Too Hot Honey-Habanero, but also a bottled hot sauce named Three Brothers Hot Pepper Sauce. Let’s see if they meet the high standards that I come to expect from this fine company.

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A month or so ago the great guys over at Zane & Zack’s World Famous Honey Company sent me along their two products for review. It came with a great letter and an instruction set on how to use the sauces and on what to use them on. Right away they get high marks for presentation.

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We were pretty pumped to get a jar of Passow’s pepper jam in the mail recently. It both looks and smell amazing. Very red and very pepper-y, I went back to basics in terms of what to try this jam out with to give it a proper tasting. The solution? PB & J, bay-bee! Here’s what the jam looked like as I opened it:

I’ve been putting this off for far too long. After getting finally re-inspired by Chuk Hell’s successful attempt at pepper jam, I finally did it. I used Chuk’s recipe as a template and I went a pepper picking in the garden.

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What better way to prime us for starting to get into hot & spicy jams & jellies than to start with one which was homemade by our very own Chuk Hell. We knew that Chuk makes some amazing hot sauces and salsas, but we didn’t know that he did jams as well. Would Chuk be able to marry the sweetness of jam with habanero heat? Well, there was only one real way to find out - and that’s to taste it for ourselves.

Originally posted on The Hot Pepper discussion forum, here’s what Chuk had to say about how he made this version of Habanero Jam:

Ingredients and Directions:

Removed the seeds from about 25 habs and put ‘em in the blender.

-Added 3/4 cup vinegar and gave it a good spin.

-Poured this into a sauce pan and added 3 1/2 cups sugar and brought to
a boil.

-After about 20 minutes I added about 2/3 a packet of instant pectin (which may have been a bit too much) and boiled for another minute or 2.

-I ladled the stuff into half pint jars and followed canning procedure.

While that sounds simple enough, it has to be a challenge for someone like us who’s not used to canning/bottling products we have made or making jams/jellies in general. Cracking open this jar of habanero sweetness, we saw this in our jar:

It looks so innocent, doesn’t it? With no less than 25 habaneros within the mixture we knew this jam was a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, so we we had to figure out how to try this jam in a couple of different ways aside from just eating a spoonful right out of the jar. First, we spooned out a bit to get an idea of its consistency and general looks. We saw this:

Taste: Chuk suggested trying this with a little cream cheese, so that was our first taste test. We did this two ways. First we poured a little over some cream cheese to eat with crackers and the other was a topping to an already-covered bagel. In both cases, the mixture of sweet & heat were excellent. I was concerned that the habanero bits might make it taste a little too chunky, but it melted in my mouth like all the rest. I also tried it on a sandwich with a little peanut butter. Talk about a PB&J for a chilehead!! Outstanding.

Overall recommendation: Well, Chuk Hell has done it again by making another outstanding culinary creation. If he can make some habanero jab that a professed non-jam eater will like, then odds are you may like it too. I may have limited its uses to some standard option, but the sky’s the limit for what you can do with this if you try. It’s heat level is about 6/10, which is pretty respectable for jam. Taste-wise, it clocks in much higher. Write to Chuk and see if he can make some more of this stuff. I can’t wait to see what else Chuk cooks up!

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