Tangy Pain In My Mouth

Having recently visited a hot sauce festival up in Canada, I now have a ton of bottles of hot sauce I get to eat through. This is a blessing, not a hardship. But because I have all these bottles, the only thing I can think to do (aside from eat everything in sight) is review all these tasty flavors. So this will be the first part in an ongoing series (as I open bottles and taste them) of hot sauce round-ups, reviewing everything I picked up.

Note, though, that these are all the sauces I bought, not just the ones I tried at the festival. I didn’t think to collect my thoughts there, with pictures, so all I have are the ones I thought were good enough to buy. As such this will naturally skew these reviews as I didn’t buy anything that was truly boring or terrible and, as such, now I don’t have those bad ones to review. Consider it a bit of a glow-up for the ones that were worth getting:

The Hub Sauce Co. Tractor Red Tomato Apple Thyme

We start on the milder end of the spectrum with one of the oddities I found at the festival. The Hub Sauce Co. is literally one dude, growing fresh ingredients himself and turning them into tasty, tangy spreads, sauces, and chutneys. And that’s what this Red Tomato Apply Thyme sauce is, somewhere between a butter and a chutney. It’s thick, with a smooth consistency that has some body to it. It’s not very chunky, but you can detect little pieces of tomato and apple in the sauce.

And the flavor is very good. It’s tangy more than sweet, with a mild heat to it. It’s not a sauce I would use in barbeque; I think it would go better as an accent to certain Asian dishes, like curries, or maybe sampled with some cheese and toast. It’s really hard to think of proper applications of it, but it’s tangy, herby flavor was so good I had to get a bottle of it regardless of what I could do with it. Sometimes flavor is enough to sell me something.

The Hub Sauce Co. Canadian Cue! Maple BBQ Sauce

And while I was at his booth I also grabbed his actual barbeque sauce. We’re still at the lower end of the spice spectrum, but where the Red Tomato Apple Thyme butter was so mild I didn’t detect any spice to it, this Canadian Cue! Maple BBQ Sauce has some bite to it. Not a lot, as I would still consider this pretty mild, but I can taste just a slight, lingering touch of heat on my tongue when I taste it, which might be a medium for some people instead of mild.

The flavor, though, is so good. The creator said he uses a ton of maple syrup in it, to the point that it will caramelize if applied to meat while on the grill. It has a sweet smoky flavor to it, with that spicy little bit of kick, and I can already say that it has become my favorite barbeque sauce (sorry, Stubb’s). It’s again the wired thing where I didn’t expect to go to a hot sauce festival and get barbeque sauce, since there are so many more “traditional” hot sauces at the event, but it just goes to show that having something different isn’t always a bad thing.

Haico’s Honey Mustard (Not Just*) BBQ Sauce

And I didn’t get just one barbeque sauce; I got two. Haico’s Honey Mustard is actually an award winning sauce (apparently they got one of the judged awards from the event while they were there), and tasting it myself I can see why. This is a sweet and tangy sauce, but this time on the mustard side of the equation. Still not very spicy, but it does have a low heat that builds over time, so while I consider it mild, this is probably a medium for most people (or, at least, a mild-plus).

The flavor is quite nice, with a mustard forward note that blends well with the honey. Like the maple barbeque sauce above, I would consider this a stickier sauce, like a glaze, which would be good when applied to meat on the grill, giving it a little time to caramelize when cooking. I’m not usually one for honey mustard but this has the right level of sweetness and spice that I actually do enjoy it. It’s a close second in my book behind the maple cue above, but that’s still a high mark for a good sauce.

Haut Sauce Co. Ghostly Maple Mustard

And then we have one more non-traditional sauce for the first review set. This one comes to us from Haut Sauce Co. and… actually, I don’t remember anything about the people I bought this from. I’ll admit I don’t tend to look people in the eyes normally, and I saw so many booths that they all blended together. Who I spoke to about this sauce and why I bought it from them instead of walking on to a different location I can’t really say. But the sauce is pretty tasty.

This is a mustard sauce with maple flavors, but don’t think of it like another barbeque. This is a different beast altogether. Served up in a smaller bottle, like a traditional hot sauce, this isn’t sticky or sweet. It’s more of a light and tangy sauce with medium heat that finds a low glow on your tongue and lingers for a little while. But it’s that mustard flavor that really shines through in this sauce.

It’s got the consistency of stone ground mustard, with flecks and bits in the sauce. It would be a thinner sauce if not for the consistency, but it does make it something I’d use more on a strong meat, something where I want some added flavor but I don’t want to sweeten up the whole meal. The maple and ghost pepper flavors add notes, but the mustard is the clear champion here, making for a very tasty, medium heat existence.

The other sauces from this set I would absolutely use when preparing and/or serving barbeque, but Haut Sauce’s mustard sauce makes more sense at a St. Patrick’s Day meal or when serving lamb. It’s good, but its applications are more specific.

Next Time…

I already have a few more bottles open that I plan to review quickly, and these are more in the traditional range of consistencies and flavors. Well, some of them anyway. But we’ll get to those soon enough…