Marie Sharp’s Scorpion & Habanero Pepper Sauce Review

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled Rocky’s sauce review for a special bulletin. Marie Sharp’s has a new sauce. I repeat, Marie Sharp’s has a new sauce!

Yes, kids, that’s right. My favorite hot sauce company has themselves a new hot sauce on their shelves! Well, it’s been there for about a month or so, but holiday shipping is already wild. Holiday international shipping is even wilder (my sauce shipped the middle of last month, but apparently wanted to visit its family in Winnipeg before making its way down to Atlanta). Why did this sauce come from Canada? Well, it’s a Canadian exclusive! Thankfully, the fine folks at MS Canada were kind enough to send me some (along with some bottles of squash, because I was out and that stuff is amazing). And it showed up yesterday. So, of course I wanted to try it today and tell you all about it!

So, what is this new sauce? Well, one critique of Marie Sharp’s sauces that some hot-sauce-heads have is that nothing is really super-dee-duper hot. And, in a way, I agree. I’ve had all of Marie’s sauces, including Smokin’ Marie and Beware, their two hottest sauces on the shelf, and while they were very definitely hot (don’t misconstrue my feelings here), they certainly weren’t as hot as some of the sauces I’ve put on my tongue (I’m looking at you, Brain Burner and The Last Dab XXX, among others). And while I’m not personally here to blow my tongue up, there are those that genuinely enjoy those types of sauces and can also really handle that much spice (I, personally, think these people are possibly part bird (side note: birds don’t react to capsaicin and are, in fact, supposed to eat the pepper’s fruit. Since they don’t have teeth, the seeds make it through the bird’s digestive tract unharmed and then are spread later on when the bird… y’know. Meanwhile, the heat keeps away mammals, who are reactive to capsaicin and avoid the fruit, because their teeth would grind up the seeds, destroying them before they have a chance to grow)).

Well, all of that ends with the creation of Scorpion & Habanero, Marie Sharp’s latest creation. This sauce is simple and straight-forward. It’s here to be a Marie Sharp’s super-hot and that’s what you get. You can tell that right from the ingredients. What are those ingredients? Glad you asked:

Scorpion Peppers (a special red hornet variety, apparently, the first of its type grown in Marie Sharp’s home country of Belize), habanero peppers, vinegar, salt, onion, and garlic.

No carrots. No extra spices (well, beyond some onion and garlic). And it starts off with those scorpion peppers. This sauce is here to do one thing and do it to the max.

Now, for this review, I was going to have 3 chicken strips. The first would have Marie Sharp’s Original sauce. The second would have Beware, MS’s previously-hottest sauce. The third would have Scorpion. I even bought an extra bottle of Beware just for this (because my previous bottle had long since been used up).

Family photo with the new addition

However, I came to find out that I was actually out of Marie Sharp’s Original. Well, I’d ordered another bottle just this morning, though I thought I still had just the very last bits of my previous bottle left. Such was not the case. Oh well. I still had the Beware and the Scorpion.

So, as I got the chicken out of the oven, I put Beware on one strip and ate it. And, yeah, that’s a really good sauce, y’all. Very early on when I started doing reviews, I lamented at the lame-ness of the Hotter varieties of off-the-shelf sauces and how they either weren’t all that much hotter or were overly-hot and had no flavor. But Beware doesn’t do that. It’s definitely hotter than MS Original, but it’s still got lots of that great flavor of the Original sauce. And yeah, it’s plenty hot. A swig of whole milk later and I was ready to give Scorpion a try. Onto the chicken it went.

That’s easily a 3-bite chicken strip and you can tell that I was not shy with the sauce on there. That end at the bottom would be my first bite, too. The sauce is rather thick. The dots of it around the chicken are from me shaking the bottle hard to get the sauce out and it basically missing. Where you see it on the chicken is where it stayed.

The sauce smells very familiar. Yes, it’s a scent I’ve come to know and fear. It’s that smell of vinegar and what I’ve coined as the smell of capsaicin. It’s just a scent of heat. Of spice. It’s a scent that tells my brain, “Hey, you really don’t want to do this, do you?” Because no, I shouldn’t want to do this. The whole point of that smell is to make a mammal like myself go, “hmm… maybe I’ll see what else is around…” But, in I go and take that big first bite.

Much like how the scent is familiar, the flavor is very familiar, too. I’ve mentioned before in the various super-hot sauce reviews that many taste incredibly similar to me. There’s the flavor of the vinegar and the flavor of heat. And that’s much of what I get here. It’s the distilled vinegar sour/bitter flavor and then the heat starts to build. I must say that it was a slow-grow in terms of the heat. I got through all three bites before it really started to get on top of me. The third bite was with blue cheese dressing and that one was actually very good. I don’t know if it was just the fact that it was my third bite of the sauce or the combination of the sauce and the dressing, but I feel like I got a super-fruity flavor from it. I remember thinking, “wow, that tastes a lot like grapes.” It was actually very good. While I can say that I have had enough sauces to know the flavors of a jalapeno or habanero or serrano, I can’t really say that I know what a scorpion pepper actually tastes like on its own. The sauces that’ve had them all have the heat pile on too quick for me to get an reading on it. Perhaps, here, with the blue cheese, it gave me enough time to get that flavor. Not to say that a Scorpion Pepper tastes exactly like a grape, but these are fruits after all, and so they should have a sweetness to them.

Anyway, yes, as I say, the sauce had a very familiar flavor of vinegar and then heat. I will say that the vinegar wasn’t as sour/bitter as many of the other super-hots, and the overall heat level, while certainly pretty intense, was also not quite as extreme as other super-hots. As such, while I didn’t have the sauce on all my chicken (stay tuned for that review coming up), I was able to get through those 3 bites of that chicken strip and only had to have a couple more swigs of whole milk and water to get the heat back down to where it didn’t hurt to breathe anymore.

All in all: was Scorpion and Habanero ever really going to possibly become my new favorite sauce of all time? Proooobably not. It had a lot stacked against it in that regard. This sauce was designed for spice-heads who really want to ramp up the heat. And it certainly does that. I’m just not really the intended audience. It would be like me criticizing a pair of kid’s shoes because they’re too small. They weren’t made for my foot. But, I can still look at them and judge their quality. And, as always, Marie Sharp delivers on quality. She’s got her own special brand of peppers she’s put in this sauce and the taste is good. Since the vinegar hit isn’t as bad, I like it more than the other super-hots I’ve had. And, of course, sauce aside, Marie Sharp’s Sauces is just an amazing group of people. Everyone I’ve ever talked to from there have been extremely kind. And, of course, special shout out to James and Ellen for sending these out to me from Thunder Bay. So, I would have no problems recommending this sauce to someone who wanted something to really knock them for a loop.

Suggested dishes: Well, as usual for these super-hots, I don’t really know what I’d suggest putting it on, since it’s really out of my wheelhouse in terms of flavors. But whatever you put it on, just make sure it can stand up to the vinegar and the heat. Keep that in mind and you’ll be good to go.

If you want to give this sauce a try for yourself, you can find it on the Marie Sharp’s Canada page here: https://mariesharpscanada.com/product/scorpion/

And be sure to say hi to James and Ellen for me.