Welcome back everyone to my hot sauce reviews. I really need to get a move on with these. I’ve still got a bunch leftover from December and just yesterday I got notification that my next Heatonist Subscription Box is coming very soon. Being sick last week didn’t help. I had wanted to get to these sauces then, but my nose was stuffed up.
“But doesn’t hot sauce help clear your sinuses?”
Yes, it very much does, and I was certainly loading up on the Frank’s on whatever I was eating. But I could definitely tell that my cold was affecting my sense of taste. And since I want to make sure all these sauces get a fair shake, I decided to wait. But that ends now. Or… it ends about 10 minutes ago when I had a tongue-swab of the sauce in question here now.
Haico’s Hot Sauce is a sauce given to me by a friend in Canada. So we’re going international with this one. Now, I was expecting Canadian hot sauce to just be maple syrup, but apparently such isn’t the case. This sauce does have maple syrup in it, though.
Scorpion’s Kiss is one of the hottest sauces that this company has, apparently, as their own heat index scale on the side of the bottle has it up at the top. That makes sense since it’s first three ingredients are hot peppers, and some of them are some of the hottest around, made up of Ghost, Trinidad Scorpion, and Jalapeno.
This isn’t my first run-in with any of these peppers. Most notably, I tangoed with Trinidad Scorpion back courtesy of Wiltshire Farms. That sauce was like a regular pepper sauce, but turned up to a thousand. How will this one do? Let’s find out.
Opening up the bottle, this sauce smells hot. Like, you just know that you’re going to be getting some capsaicin with this one. Taking the swab and tasting it, there’s a lot going on with this sauce. It’s a real burst of flavor, a lot of it very sweet and fruity. Now, the sweet I understand because of the aforementioned maple syrup (first time I’ve ever had a hot sauce with that in there). The fruitiness is a little harder to pin down. I remember the Scorpion being pretty straightforward. Ghosts much the same. Jalapenos are grassy. I don’t really get much grassy from this sauce. But yeah, there’s a lot of brightness going on. The sauce uses Apple Cider Vinegar instead of regular white vinegar, and I feel that could be adding to it as well. Granted, I didn’t have very long to really savor the flavor, as the heat very quickly rolled in (about 2-3 seconds). And it’s a lot of heat. After an initial cough and a swig of milk, it mellowed out semi quickly, but it’s still here on my tongue.
I remember with the Wiltshire sauce, the heat went away almost immediately. It was actually remarkable. I am guessing that’s some of what’s happening here. The Scorpion “hit it and quit it” as it does, and that was the sudden drop off. However, the Ghost and the Jalapeno are hanging on, and that’s what’s still getting me.
Do I like this sauce? Yes. I do. As I say, it’s very bright and fresh and fruity-tasting. I think it’s a good mix of flavors all together.
However, that being said, it’s beyond my heat tolerance level. This will be a donation sauce, as I wouldn’t be able to get through the whole bottle without a lot of time and effort. It’s one of those sauces that I wish I had a higher tolerance overall, as it’d be good to have, but it’s just beyond me.
Suggested dishes: wings, shrimp, toss a couple drops in a fruit salad.
If you’re interested in getting your own bottle of Canadian heat, you can find it on Haico’s site here: https://squareup.com/store/haicos-hot-sauce/item/scorpion-s-kiss
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