Review - Jake Albert's Fuego Rojo
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With a name like "Fuego Rojo" (Spanish for "red fire") one might expect a delicious hot pepper sauce that would be used to coat your enchiladas or spice up some pork tamalitos. Instead, it's a unique sweet chile glaze made by Jake Albert's Specialty Foods of Ontario. Company founder Jay Calvert (his business' moniker is a play on his first and last names) recently shipped me a bottle of the stuff to get my thoughts on it.
Ingredients:
Fair Trade Certified Organic Cane Sugar, low temperature extraction Pomegranate Concentrate, 100% Canadian Honey, Fresh Orange Habanero Peppers, Spring Water
Aroma:
3.5 out of 5. I sense heavy honey, sugar, and pomegranate. It's like a spicy, fruity honey. What's the spicy component? Obviously, habaneros have a very distinct, fruit-like aroma, but if that smell is in here, it's very well blended with the rest of the ingredients. Yet you can still tell that something is "hot" in this glaze even if the habs aren't immediately recognizable.
Appearance and Texture:
3 out of 5. It's a viscid, semi-translucent liquid with that's brownish-red in color, and contains lots of tiny pieces, a "micro-pulp" if you will, of pomegranate mixed in. It has a viscosity and consistency similar to honey, and is a bit thinner and easier to pore.
You know how whenever you mess with regular honey and the it seems to get all over the place, such as down the sides of the bottle and all over your hands? The same goes for this Fuego Rojo. It can be a potentially messy product.
Taste and Heat:
4 out of 5. The dominant flavor of Fuego Rojo is less honey and sugar and more pomegranate. There is also a habanero-induced warmth that comes within a second of two of tasting this and hits the back of the tongue. The heat is nothing that would blast your mouth out. In fact, most chileheads would deem this mild-medium sensation as a "comforting" warmth; it's "cozy", nice, and the perfect level for this type of product. Mild-mouths may find it a bit too much to bear.
It's interesting to note that Jake Albert's website mentions "the spicy, almost smoky, pungent flavour of the Habanero" but I could not detect any smokiness at all, even "almost" - only the pure heat and possible fruitiness of the chile pepper.
And with all of Jake Albert's promotion on his website, on Facebook, and on Twitter of this glaze being good on ice cream, I just had to test out this application. Long before I considered myself a chilehead, I was an ice cream fanatic, and I still consider it to this day to be my favorite snack food. I drizzled heavy amounts of the glaze on the frozen dessert and was pleased with the results. The fruit flavor and the heat fit in admirably with the ice cream. This may be the best spicy topping I've placed on frozen foods since I've tried since the stellar Cow Girl Delicately Hot Caramel Dessert Sauce.
There was another usage I stumbled upon that I think is even better than ice cream. One morning I made myself the first bagel I've had in a couple of months. It was a blueberry one smeared with a bit of cream cheese. I poured a little Fuego Rojo on top and, YIPES it was fantastic! If you've ever had honey on a similarly-dressed bagel, just imagine that twice as good with a slight fruit flavor and a good dose of heat. Get yourself some of this sauce, try it like this, and tell me this ain't addictive.
What else can you use Jake Albert's Fuego Rojo on? I'm guessing chicken breasts or chicken wings, the later of which can be breaded or unbreaded. Going in the breakfast route, pancakes, waffles or crepes would be nice with this sauce. And even an oven-roasted or barbecue pork butt could potentially benefit with this sweet n' spicy glaze.
Label and Bottle:
3 out of 5. This 8.8 oz bottle (this is a thick, heavy glass) has a unique hexagonal shape and a relatively small front label. If I saw this at a retail store and simply glanced at it, I probably couldn't tell exactly what kind of sauce or condiment this was. There is a multi-panel back label with more information.
Overall:
Not a bad first effort from the young company. If you're enthralled by the idea of "sweet and heat" like I am, then Fuego Rojo might be worth a try for ya.
One big negative I see if the price - unless you live near the handful of stores in Ontario that stock this product, you're looking at a $20 CAD charge (which converts to around $19.35 USD at the time of this writing) for ordering one bottle online AND for flat-rate shipping to most places in the United States and Canada. To be fair, I'm sure it does cost a pretty penny to ship this stuff south of the Canadian border, but it is a bit costly for a just a bottle of glaze.
You can purchase or learn more about this product at the Jake Albert's website.
Related Articles:
Spicy Food Reviews - Hot Sauce Reviews, Hot Snacks, Hot Wings, Seasonings, BBQ Sauces, Condiments, and More
Chilehead is Making His Dreams Come True - Jay Calvert of Jake Albert's Specialty Foods
Review - Diane's Sweet Heat Habanero Jams
Comments
2009-10-13 19:57:56
I'm going to assume it was bottled there, what with the "fair trade" schtick attached.
I've seen his product at Taste on the Danfourth, too pricey to actually buy anything in there anyways.
Might be worth checking out based on this review though.
I hope it's a different sauce from Pepper Master's and not just repackaged stuff.
2009-10-14 06:07:05
-Jay
2009-10-21 11:09:22
WOOHOO!!!
--Jay
2009-10-22 15:19:48
Unlike some companies, Brooks Pepperfire Foods does not now nor have we ever "repackaged stuff". We do batch bottling of three products and three products only: Curry Fire, Pepper Fire and Mango Fire. These are designed as ad specialties and we make this point to people who are considering using them for a hot sauce line they wish to commercialize. No sense trying to commercialize something available under another's label. 1000's of hot sauce companies make that mistake which is why so many of those sauces with the funky labels all taste the same.
Peppermaster(R) Global Fusion Cooking and Grilling Sauces are not being "repackaged", they're a lot more exclusive than that and they're going to stay that way.
Yes, Fuego Rojo is Jay Calvert's recipe and yes, we bottle the product for him. And of course it's expensive... You get what you pay for. Jay wanted the best, that's why he came to us. It is also why all of our customers come to us.
Now, that has been addressed, back to the topic at hand...
This glaze is delicious and it's hot. And as Scott pointed out, if you like sweet heat, this is an exceptional example of it.
As for the recent Scovie wins, congratulations, Jay. You give great recipe. Fuego Rojo deserved to win all three of them! Way to go, mate.
2009-10-22 15:26:00
-Jay
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