Review - Crazy Uncle Jester's Spontaneous Combustion Hot Sauce
Crazy Uncle Jester's Spontaneous Combustion™ XXXtra Hot Louisiana-Style Hot Sauce took home the Golden Chile Award at Chile Pepper Magazine's Fiery Food Challenge last September. Impressive credential indeed, and after I sampled many of the fine CUJ sauces and condiments at this year's Weekend of Fire, I was hankerin' to crack open (figuratively, of course) this bottle and sample the goods.
Ingredients:
Vinegar, Habaneros, Serranos, Jalapenos, Salt, Spices, Capsicum
Aroma:
2.5 out of 5. Although Capsicum (extract) is the last ingredient listed, it's the dominant aroma in this sauce. Perhaps you may not mind it so much, but since I'm not a big extract fan, I don't exactly find smell tantalizing.
Appearance and Texture:
3.5 out of 5.
Deep transcendent red, and watery like a Louisiana pepper sauce should be.
Taste Straight Up:
2 out of 5. The first thing that hits you is the tanginess from the vinegar and a bit of chile mixture. But within seconds the screamin' heat and bitterness from the extract pushed their way to the forefront and covered up nearly all the flavor of the other ingredients. Sorry, but I did not find this very flavorful.
Taste on Food:
2.5 out of 5. I was sincerely hoping that food in concert with the taste of Spontaneous Combustion would produce better results. The sauce fared better on homemade chicken breast nuggets, but only slightly. I found that the extract was just too powerful to be great-tasting. It was dark, bitter, and could have use some naturally flavor and heat from the habaneros instead of extract.
Scott eating a plateful of chicken breast nuggets dipped in Spontaneous Combustion.
Suggested Uses:
Maybe Spontaneous Combustion would be fit as a food additive, to splash in some chili or to mix in with an already savory-tasting wing sauce. Just make sure you have an already well-seasoned dish and use Spontaneous Combustion sparingly to add a dash of heat.
Heat:
4.5 out of 5. Not for novices. It's like a sledgehammer slamming down on the tongue with it's fire. To be more specific, I found the heat noticeably hitting a specific area I don't recall ever getting a pinpoint hit before: underneath my tongue down to below the underside of my chin, almost reaching the outside of skin. Weird.
Label:
4 out of 5. Like the other Crazy Uncle Jester's products, they feature a cool, consistent look in their labels and display the crazy jester. Jeffery Stevenson, president and founder of Crazy Uncle Jester's, did tell me that they were in the process of redesigning and implementing new labels due to pressure from DC Comics, because of the character's resemblance to a certain cartoon villain.
Overall:
It's frustrating as heck that I can't find myself to like this sauce. Crazy Uncle Jester's is a good company with nice products, but in my opinion this stuff doesn't cut it. I would recommend that they tweak the formula, but with an award already given to this sauce I sincerely doubt they'll mess with this any time soon. I guess I'll have to end my opinion piece with, "to each his own."
(As of this writing, Crazy Uncle Jester's website is down due to a .NET runtime error. They may get this fixed within the next few days, so if you're interested in this or any of their products check in periodically.)
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2009-08-16 17:53:05
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