Review - Scovilla's Dragonfire Sauces - Beast Killer, Number One, Ultra Blast and End of Time
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This review should probably be of genuine interest to the hardcores out there, the chileheads who regard the average habanero condiment as a "medium"-level table sauce. I'm talking about pepper extract sauces, the bitter capsaicin is introduced into the recipe to produced heat levels unobtainable by natural chile peppers, even the mighty naga bhut jolokia.
Because extract is considered by a virtual consensus to be a more of a negative-tasting ingredient than a positive one - despite the extra heat it delivers - the sauces containing this substance are almost always presumed to taste bitter and any reviews of them must be "graded on a curve". A reasoning of "this tastes good for an extract sauce" must be brought into play, and Scovilla's Dragonfire sauces are no exception.
The quartet of Dragonfire products - Beast Killer, Number One, Ultra Blast and End of Time (to be technical, Beast Killer is a non-extract elixir) - all promise to be tongue-screaming hot sauces put forth by the young German company to unleash on the heat-loving throngs. What did I think of them? Read on to see...
Beast Killer
Ingredients
Naga peppers, salt, pineapples, water, acetic acid, onion powder, pineapple essence
Smells very strong and bitter, and if the ingredients list hadn't left it off there, I would have sworn chile extract was included in this. The consistency was the creamiest and pureed out of the four Dragonfire sauces, and had possibly the lightest color. How was the taste? Upon a bare lick, the first thing I encountered was an extremely tart and an almost gingerly brought-on sweet taste underpinning this puckering brightness. I couldn't detect too much of the bhut/naga jolokia's trademark fruity and citrus-like flavor, and instead felt only the heat after it ramped up about five seconds later. The fire built, and built and built! As the label proudly proclaims "out of oleo" (as in Scovilla "ran out" of oleoresin and not "this was made out of oleo"), there is no extract in Beast Killer at all. This is definitely among the top sauces I've ever eaten that's gotten the natural burn from chile peppers and not from extract of any kind. I've tasted much better jolokia sauces, but when you reach heat levels as stratospheric as this, you have to expect to compromise a bit of flavor for raw, capsaicin-induced sizzle.
Heat: 4 out of 5
Overall: 3 out of 5
Number One
Ingredients
Water, selected pepper pulp, onions, capsaicin extract, vegetable oil, salt, tomato paste, acetic acid, cane sugar, garlic powder, xanthan gum, cirtic acid
Is is redder, slightly thicker and more pasty (think tomato ketchup) than the Beast Killer. Number One has a strangely more subdued scent, and even odder that mixed in with the extract and onion aromas, there is an edge of fruity sweetness to the smell. The flavor is much more harsh and extract-like and has little added support from the remainder of the food components. The heat is more rapid at getting started, and after three seconds you're already facing pain smack down the inside of the gun barrel. Number One has less taste I like and more fire than the Beast Killer. Intense.
Heat: 4.5 out of 5
Overall: 2 out of 5
Ultra Blast
Ingredients
Water, habanero peppers, naga peppers, onion, capsicum extract, salt, vegetable oil, chipotle peppers, acetic acid, cane sugar, garlic powder, citric acid, xanthan gum, liquid smoke, passion fruit essence
Going even further up the burn scale is Ultra Blast. It's smell is the more "traditional" (for lack of a better term) capsicum extract one would stumble upon if they were opening a bottle of Blair's of CaJohns super hot condiments, and also had some aromas from the habs and the nagas. It's texture is even more dense and dispenses out of the bottle more in globs, and is extremely deep and dark crimson in hue. It's flavor was actually pleasant at first, allowing me to soak in some of the onion, garlic, chipotle and fruity attributes before being hit in the tongue with a sledgehammer. The burn is much slower to scale up. Because the Number One possesses a snappier heat, for the longest time I considered Ultra Blast to be lower in spiciness. That is, until the 30-second mark. By then, I realized that my tongue was throbbing, my ears were hurting and my eyes had become a tear factory. In conclusion, Ultra Blast was able to have the edge over Number One in both taste and incendiary power.
Heat: 5 out of 5
Overall: 2.5 out of 5
End of Time
Ingredients
Habanero peppers, naga peppers, water, onions, capsicum extract, vegetable oil, salt, tomato paste, cocoa powder, passion fruit, acetic acid, cane vinegar, garlic powder, citric acid, xanthan gum, passion fruit essence
We've reached the end of the line with End of Time sauce. Straightaway I know that this would be a different beast because after taking a whiff, I sensed chocolate in addition to the extract and peppers, perhaps indicating that this sauce had a richness the others didn't necessarily have. It's thick and vicious, and also dark red, similar to the Ultra Blast. Right off the bat was the fresh chile pepper taste that I hadn't detected from the previous three Dragonfire sauces. There was tartness, sweetness and bitterness all making their stakes in the flavor game. I rather liked the threads of flavors dancing to and fro, with the right amount of richness from the cocoa powder merging with the tomato paste and fruit ingredients, with a balanced taste from the peppers. The extract, which is always unmistakable with its bitter, chemical-like callings, was intruding on the good taste only moderately. What about the heat? It seemed no hotter than the Ultra Blast and boasted an almost identical climb up the hill to a fiery, mouth-numbing pinnacle. Ironically, despite that fact that End of Time hot sauce might have had the highest amount of extract (which I generally dislike) and the loftiest heat levels, I came out liking this one the most out of the four Dragonfire sauces.
Heat: 5 out of 5
Overall: 3.5 out of 5
Clockwise from Top-left: Beast Killer, Number One, End of Time, and Ultra Blast
On Food
Super-hot or extract pepper sauces usually share the same traits: they really don't go "well" with foods; even the most experienced chilehead uses them sparingly; and they're mostly around for shock value or to use as an additive. Let's face it, most heat freaks aren't going to drench their hamburgers and pizza slices in this stuff. More likely, they'll mix it in with taco meat, stir it in with chili or splash on little drops atop nachos. The last of those is precisely how I tasted the Scovilla's Dragonfire sauces in the "sauce with meal" portion of this review.
How did they fare? Well first left me state that these "super nachos" consisted of good ol' tortilla chips, refried beans, seasoned beef, shredded monterey jack and colby cheese, iceberg lettuce shreds and roma tomato chinks. The Beast Killer's light, smooth texture and flavor seamlessly blended in with the food, yet offered little more than a heat punch. Number One was a fire provider, but the extract qualities distracted from the overall taset of the chip and I preferred it not to even be on there. Ultra Blast was very much like the Number One in the amount of scalding lick it provided and had less of the nagging, chemical jarring of pepper extract. I sort of liked it on there. As expected, End of Time hammered home waves of pain and nuclear fury to the nacho chip on which I tried it.
After a while, subsequent drops of Scovilla's Dragonfore sauces proved to be more difficult to distinguish as the throbbing burn from each one blended into one another. It simply felt like more burn and less flavor at the end of the meal.
Labels:
These are colorful yet chaotic. Each one displays a fire-breathing dragon and bright graphics which include a "blast power" chart that ranges from 1 to 4 and text in both German and English.
In Conclusion:
You'll get a lot of burn for the money, and as you'd guess, your mileage varies with extract sauces. Scovilla's Dragonfire is no exception. For more information, go to their English language site at http://www.scovilla.com/index.php/language/en.
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