Wow, it’s been over five months since we did our first set of reviews on the Chooch and Pootan hot sauces. We didn’t intend on taking so long to do the Chooch and Pootan wing sauces, but the fact is that we don’t eat a whole lot of chicken wings at home these days…especially deep-fried ones. So, we had to wait until that perfect time came along where we could give these sauces a fair shake over some wings cooked up in our very own kitchen.

Admittedly, we didn’t wait all this time to open the bottles. We had opened a few up just to taste ahead of time, and was pleasantly surprised with how good they were straight out of the bottle. In fact, we found ways to use them for food other than chicken wings, but we’ll save that for our discussion about each sauce in particular.

To keep the calorie counts in the reasonable range, we made the decision to oven-bake the wings. It’s certainly cleaner than doing the deep-fry method, since you don’t end up with oil droplets scattered all over the cooking area. We picked up this mega-huge container of wings from our local Sam’s Club, and got them ready for baking in one of our Pyrex oven dishes.
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Slowly but surely, we have been working our way through our box of sample goodies from the Peppermaster. Finding our way to this sauce, called Wings of Fire, harkens us back to the days when we used to eat chicken wings like they were going out of style.

Oh, for those bygone days. Nowadays, we’re trying to make ourselves healthier and thinner…so we have to forgo those chicken wings in favor of some other stuff where we can use sauces like this.

Well, it’s a good thing that this sauce was designed to do more than just bathe deep-fried chicken wings. According to the sauce’s description, it is something like this:

The Peppermaster’s answer to Buffalo Chicken wings!

You first taste the fresh roasted garlic and then the fresh roasted hot chili peppers. Provides great flavour and quick heat that disipates rapidly from the mouth.

Delectable and mild enough to use just about everywhere!

Try it on chicken fingers, or in a sandwich to add flavour.

Toss chicken wings in this sauce for mild hot wings.

Use in place of your regular cayenne pepper sauce.

In theory, this should be a great sauce in that it can be used for a variety of food options. Rated at 7 flames (out of 10) for heat, it should be fairly hot as well. As for its composition, gaze upon this:

Ingredients: fire roasted fresno peppers, vinegar, spring water, fire roasted garlic, fresh habaneros, lime juice, cornstarch, rum, sesame oil, sea salt, guar gum

The one thing that continues to impress me about the Peppermaster products is their use of fresh ingredients without any preservatives. Cracking the little mini-jar I have open, I can mostly detect the aroma of garlic and vinegar with some undertones of habanero. It’s a seed-laden sauce, although likely from the fresno peppers moreso than the habs. The consistency is more on the thinner side of the spectrum and pours easily from the bottle.

Taste: Having merely a 45 mL sample jar, I had to use this in fairly measured amounts. Just for sampling, I tried this sauce with a little spoon just to get a feel for it. It has a nice peppery taste which is a little milder than I thought it might be. A little less habanero in favor of the fresnos, this one is probably more like a 5 or 6 out of 10 for heat, but it does build a little as you eat more. The pure taste with all the spices is good, but there was something about the mouth feel that wasn’t quite right. I suspect it was the sesame oil, but also the hint of rum didn’t add anything for me either.

In culinary use, it worked out a little better. I went with a couple of the suggested uses, for sandwiches and chicken (which I grilled). It seemed to work better with the cooked food rather than as a condiment, as the heat seemed to mellow the flavor a little. I actually like this sauce as a cooking/saute sauce and cooked up a little bit of chicken and veggies with it that were pretty darn good. The one use that I didn’t try? With chicken wings! Go figure.

Overall recommendation: This wing sauce from Peppermaster isn’t your typical wing sauce, and may have those who either really like it or really don’t. With a taste profile that seemed more like a cooking sauce than a wing sauce, trial-and-error will determine what you’d like it best used upon. If you want to try it on chicken wings, all the better. Not as spicy-hot as I thought it would be, the flavor is one you’ll have to judge for yourself. Enjoy!

Well, it’s been a while since I have reviewed a wing sauce…so what better way to get back into the game than with one of the selection from Monty’s Gourmet Foods. While the spicier wing sauces were beckoning to me, I opted to go with the Roasted Garlic Wing Sauce because I really enjoy garlicky sauces a great deal. Few garlic sauces seem to retain much in the way of heat, but if any sauce can do that…Monty’s can.

One problem, if you can call it that, was that we don’t make a whole lot of chicken wings at home these days. Due to diet restrictions and just an overall concern for our dietary health, our deep-fryer is on indefinite hiatus except for special occasions. So, the “challenge” for this sauce was to find some other uses aside from using it strictly for chicken wings. As an aspiring gourmand-wannabe, I took up this challenge with a few suggestions for help. Here is the description of the sauce from the MGF website:

This one is all about the garlic! Super duper garlic flavor and smell sets this wing sauce onto a level of pure goodness that cannot be beat! If you like garlic, you will love this wing sauce. Your wings will thank you, your guests will thank you, and your mouth will thank you for getting this sauce.

Well, I asked Monty for a few other suggestions for how to use this sauce outside the norm. Those in hand, I set off to examine this sauce a little closer. The ingredients look like this:

Ingredients: water, vinegar, peppers (red, cayenne), salt, natural butter flavor, canola oil, onion powder, granulated roasted garlic, garlic powder, xanthan gum, citric acid

First things first. While I wasn’t going to make chicken wings, I could still find a way to use it on chicken to get that similar taste thang going. Seen above are a couple of pedestrian pieces of fried chicken from one of our local eateries. I was going to make these into Roasted Garlic chicken pieces worthy of my chilehead status. How to do this? Pretty simple, really. I just took the chicken, put the pieces into a plastic container with a sealable lid, added a modicum of sauce, and shook it up.

As you can see from the picture above, the Roasted Garlic chicken just looks a lot better than the regular ol’ fried chicken. Tastewise, it’s a revelation of garlicky goodness. Slightly tart from the vinegar base, this sauce adds great garlic flavor that will make you vampire-repellant for at least an hour after your meal. As for heat, that was the bigger surprise. This sauce packs a little heat to it, moreso than expected. I’d call the heat about 6.5/10 on my heat scale, with a little accumulation the more I ate. The heat profile was very cayenne in taste, which was fine by me since I like the cayenne flavor. It was good enough that I let nary a drop of sauce shed by the chicken to go to waste.

The suggestion that I found most curious was to use this sauce as salad dressing. You usually don’t think of this kind of sauce being able to be used that wat, but I was looking for something, anything, to make my rather ordinary salad choices more interesting. So, with salad in hand, I added a huge dollop to a garden salad and set about the task of wolfing it down. The results? Thumbs up for the most part. Unlike a vinegar-and-oil dressing, this sauce didn’t really have that oil component to dull out the tartness of the vinegar…which I found to be a little distracting. Love the flavor, but I may have to mix this sauce with something else just to get over the vinegar dominance in the flavor.

Lastly, I used this as a straight-up dipping sauce. For the most part, it was a good choice. From meat to veggies, it was tough to go wrong with this sauce. It went well with most choices, but I found that I liked it so much with my french fries that I’d use it in place of catsup. Yummy!

Overall recommendation: For a sauce that I was unsure would be all that noteworthy judging from the outside of the bottle, this one turned out to be pretty darn good. Tasty and full of garlic flavor, this one had enough heat to keep me happy without shorting out my heat sensors. Don’t just save it for your chicken wings, as it will do well to flavor up a variety of other foods. Use it for yourself and see what you think. Enjoy!

Defcon, how I love thee, let me count the ways…well that might take a while, so I’ll do that later. Today, I’ll be reviewing the definitive Defcon collection, which consists of Conditions 3 through 0. Let me start this off by saying I am a huge fan of Defcon’s stuff and these are THE best wing sauces money can buy. They increase in heat as the Condition numbers drop and you can definitely tell that this is a family of sauces. Going from 3 to 0, you will notice the similarities that these sauces share, and some subtle differences.

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We received a very nice email from Angela Eakins, of Hackers BossSauce, LLC from Muncie, IN about reviewing their Wings ‘n Things sauce. Initially, we were not sure if if qualified as a “Homemade Hot Sauce” or “Product Review,” but since it’s a commercially available product we’re going to do this as a Product Review.

From their website, here’s what they say that their Wings ‘n Things sauce:

It stays where you put it because we make it that way.

It amazes me what people have said they use it on; fish, pork chops, fried potatoes, salads, hamburger, ribs, chili, and two of my favorites-chicken and shrimp.

Got some pretzels or breadsticks? Grab your favorite cold beverage and start dipping.

The sauce is hot and very spicy. The more you use…the hotter it gets!

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