Review - Crazy Uncle Jester's AfterBurner Sauce Redux
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This is review is a long, LONG time in the making.
Some of you who closely follow the major hot sauce blogs know that I've had a dislike for Crazy Uncle Jester's AfterBurner Sauce, a spicy chocolate-flavored dessert topper that's similar to Hersey's Syrup but with a scorching chile-induced kick. Many of my fellow spicy food bloggers on The Hot Zone Online (not once but twice), Peppers and More and Taste the Fear absolutely raved about it, and the product was a 2009 Scovie Award Winner, a 2010 Golden Chile Award Winner, an Every Day with Rachael Ray Magazine's Big Bite: Hot Sauce Award Winner, and a Seriouseats.com's Editors Choice award winner.
I felt like the lone wolf by voicing my displeasure of AfterBurner. So what about this product turned me off? It was primarily an unflaggingly nasty, chemical-like flavor that dominated any sign of a delicious chocolate taste. To me it wasn't exactly like the bitter quality of a pepper extract, but it was still very off-putting with a nefarious odor to match. Last but not least, I found AfterBurner's consistency and appearance to be like a runny brown paint - not exactly appealing in my eyes as I would have preferred a lower viscosity liquid.
Fast-forward to this year's Weekend of Fire hot sauce show. While talking to Crazy Uncle Jester's head honcho Jeffery Stevenson at his booth, he informed me that he knew of my past issues with AfterBurner Sauce and that he took them to heart. He had reformulated the product both in terms of flavor and consistency and offered me a sample of the new stuff on the spot. Right on the spot I liked it, and Jeff gave me a gallon of the revamped chocolate sauce to play around with at home.
The Reformulated AfterBurner
Ingredients: Sugar, evaporated milk, water, brown sugar, cocoa, flour, butter, jalapeno, habanero, vanilla, marshmallow (sugar, corn starch, gelatin)
Let's start with the texture. Because there's milk included in the ingredients, it's pretty much a necessity to keep AfterBurner refrigerated - especially considering there's just so damn much of it. So when this sauce is cold, it's thick. Very thick. The denseness and consistency is like a ultra-heavy peanut butter yet has the look of a light, whipped Devil's Food cake frosting (hey, that might have been a good name for this!). It's also a few shades less dark brown like its more syrupy predecessor.
For the actual usage of AfterBurner, heating up is required. I took a few hefty n' heaping tablespoons full and plopped them in a microwave-safe dish and nuked it at 50% power for approximately 20 seconds.
It came out softer, more pourable and slightly warm. A few stirs and it was ready. It was time to drizzle this on ice cream!
This looked fantastic, and tasted almost as good. Very little of any type of negative flavors were present, and instead packed quite a bit of rich cocoa sweetness. It struck a formidable balance of what I would look for in a dessert sauce. It was neither overpowering from any type of chile pepper presence nor was it sickening sugary and weak on the heat.
Ah, the heat. I think there was more burn in this version of AfterBurner than the 2009 one. It's not hard to fathom why. Jeff Stevenson is not only a superb cook and an inventor of unique flavor combinations, but he is unmistakably and unapologetically an extreme chilehead. He's the kind of man who will jump at the chance at partaking in most any type of spicy eating contest, and often will win them.
And Jeff loves to burn others' tongues as well as his own. He informed me that he put 6 million Scoville Heat Unit extract in his "Make Me Cough" drops, which are his sadistic little hard candies. He gave me a maple-flavored one at this year's Weekend of Fire that was unequivocally amongst the top 2 or 3 hottest things I'd ever placed in my mouth.
I kept the hellish candy in my mouth for the long haul until it dissolved, but it flat out decimated my mouth. I couldn't hold a conversation with anyone at the Weekend of Fire for a good 20 minutes after I'd finished eating it. I grabbed the only thing resembling a dairy product - Yoo-hoo Chocolate Drink - and swished it around inside my mouth in hopes that it would reduce a portion of the agonizing burn (yeah, it was dumb on my part, because there's probably very actual little milk in that beverage).
But I digress. The AfterBurner Sauce is mightily hot. It does not reach the astronomical heights of a chile extract offering, but it gives many of the fiercest habanero hot sauces - including the Red Savina types - a solid run for their money.
With the ice cream pictured above, I took a couple of large bites with plenty of AfterBurner covering them. The lush, fudgy taste was a welcome feeling, with an unexpected burn forming at the entrance of my esophagus several seconds after I swallowed. Halfway through the bowl, my tongue was throbbing big time with an astonishing fire. As I spooned out the last remnants of sauce, I felt as if I went through a 10-round bout of taking nibbles off of fatalii peppers.
While ice cream may be the most obvious application for AfterBurner, I experimented with an idea inspired by the Weekend of Fire's Ghost Pepper Brownie Brawl Buster contest - one Heartbreaking Dawns Bhutta Brownie topped with an "icing" of AfterBurner Sauce. It was a full-on, jacked-up chocolate inferno and wracked me with plenty of terrific pain. Interesting enough, although the Bhutta Brownies contain the world's hottest pepper, the bhut jolokia, I thought it was AfterBurner that boasted more heat.
In summary, AfterBurner is a full-on chocolate-y singe-fest, and is for chileheads or masochists only.
It's still not the best fudge or chocolate sauce I've had, yet Afterburner is a great product with a unique taste that I would highly recommend.
Overall Rating: 
I want to thank Jeff for listening to my comments and for vastly improving this product. Crazy Uncle Jester's AfterBurner Sauce now stands strongly alongside of many other top-notch products that populate Crazy Uncle Jester's Inferno World, a planet of pleasure and pain I enjoy visiting from time to time.
If you would like to visit the Inferno World and try out the AfterBurner Chocolate Sauce for yourself, you can rocket over to the CUJ website and pick up a 10 ounce jar for $7.00 plus shipping.
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Comments
2010-09-05 06:42:18
The ingredient list looks far more palatable than most chocolate sauces on the market, even Nutella which packs a whopping load of soybean oil.
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