Review - Cajun Heat Liquid Napalm Hot Sauce and Voodoo Ash Seasoning
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I'm doubling up for a pair of Cajun Heat brand products - Liquid Napalm hot sauce and Voodoo Ash seasoning. They're damned good and have the Scovie Awards to prove it - Liquid Napalm sauce won 1st place in the 2009 Scovie Awards for "Hot Sauce - Unique" and 2nd place the "Hot Sauce - Louisiana-Style" category. Voodoo Ash was a 1st place recipient in the "Cook-it-up Meat Required - Dry Seasoning" category. Fairly good for the first year of being in production, eh?
Liquid Napalm
Liquid Napalm is more than just a heat additive or a flavor enhancer. It grabs your tastebuds by the cajones with a duel blast of taste and fire.
Ingredients:
This is what the label reads: "If you knew, you wouldn't eat it! Habanero peppers, Vinegar, Cajun spices".
Aroma:
4 out of 5. Lots of good peppery and vinegar aromas. In addition to those, garlic and spices along with a hint of smokiness give it a busy, unique character.
Appearance and Texture:
4.5 out of 5. Liquid Napalm is miles away from the traditional cayenne n' vinegar sauces that hail from Louisiana (technically, the Cajun Heat company is based out of Virginia, so depending on where it's bottled, it might only be "Louisiana" or "Cajun" in spirit only). This isn't a watery sauce by any means. Liquid Napalm is thick and somewhat pasty, with bits and pieces of habanero seeds and spices intermingling inside the elixir. It's smooth and pours easily. It's also deep red instead of the normal orangish-red hue typical of Louisiana-style sauces. Then again, it doesn't pretend to be one.
Taste Straight Up:
4 out of 5. This sauce is good and zingy. A bit of singe and a lot of flavor - despite that fact that it's mostly habs and vinegar, the other spices are able to shine through. There's nothing "magical" about it from a taste point of view, and it's not the most perfect blend of flavors I've ever discovered in a hot sauce, but it "is what it is" and does a fine job of doing just that.
Taste on Food:
4 out of 5. I gave a bowl of homemade chili a hefty dose of this stuff. Man, did it ever kick it up a notch! What I like about Liquid Napalm is that it bestows upon your food a sparkling depth while not overpowering it. The sauce takes the spotlight yet gives plenty of breathing room for other flavors to co-exist.
Heat:
3 on a scale of 1 to 5. The burn doesn't scald your tongue, but I did feel some heat immediately. The fire did slowly build more and more intensely, which is characteristic of habanero peppers from which this sauce is made.
Label:
4.5 out of 5. I'm a big supporter of the military, but I found nothing wrong with a cartoon picture of a soldier getting a mini-mushroom cloud blown through his stomach. As long as you have a healthy sense of humor, you'll get a kick out of it, too. A half-point gets taken off for the use of the comic sans font.
Voodoo Ash
Voodoo Ash is more than just crushed dried chile peppers with some salt blended in. Although it's ingredients are simply "Salt, Spices, Cayenne Pepper" on the label, there must be some heavy-duty wizardry brought on by that vague "spices" description. This seasoning fusion is a sweet, complex coalition of Cajun savoriness and heat. I sprinkled a dash of this on the palm of my hand. The scent was delicious, and the taste was like the finest BBQ rubs I've eaten only amped up. I'm guessing at the ingredients here, but I sensed flavors like paprika, brown sugar, garlic, thyme and salt, in addition to the smokin' cayenne sensation.
I can imagine of world of uses for this. Any food where you would use all-purpose seasoning salt or a spice rub would benefit from this. Ribs, chops, steaks, burgers, meat loaf and even jerky would be fantastic with Voodoo Ash. I tried it on another bowl of chili, and it provided a beautiful sweet n' salty sting.
The colorful little label on this 3 oz bottle carries on Cajun Heat's wild tradition of awesome cartoons to help translate what's inside the containers. Here, a chile pepper (with a bone in his hair/stem) is getting "zapped" by two floating, flaming skulls which are slowly turning him into ash. The bright red and yellow label isn't hard to miss, and who wouldn't love the slogan on the side - "Eat Like a Freak"? Thumbs up to whoever conceptualized and illustrated this.
Overall:
Each product would do admirably in your kitchen with a variety of applications. If I had to choose between the two, I'd definitely pick the Voodoo Ash (it's highly deserving of its Scovie Award) over the sauce. Both are available for purchase at the Cajun Heat website.
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