Review - Splash Chipotle Hot Sauce
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After taking a week to recuperate and catch up on things from my always-exciting Weekend of Fire trip, it's time to get crackin' once again on the reviews. The product I'll be covering today is called Splash Chipotle Hot Sauce, concocted by the Tennessee-based start-up Splash Foods, LLC, and since receiving a review bottle of it in the mail I've have discovered it is quite a genre-bender...
Ingredients:
Chipotle Peppers, vinegar, water, tomatoes, onions, sugar, salt, paprika, honey, molasses, soybean oil, spices
Aroma:
3 out of 5. Smokiness is the dominant smell, but it's very tolerable and likable. There's also a sweetness present.
Appearance and Texture:
2.5 out of 5. The brown-colored Splash Chipotle Hot Sauce possesses a thick and hefty body that took me several good shakes to extract some from the bottle. I adore the core texture, but there is some watery separation from the denser, pulpier ingredients, even after vigorous shaking prior to pouring out. I would have preferred the consistency to be a little more even and uniform throughout.
Taste Straight Up:
3.5 out of 5. Upon this first hitting my tongue my mind shouted, "barbecue sauce!" This definitely blurs the line of distinction between standard hot sauces and BBQ sauces. In fact, if this were given to me in a blind taste test, I probably would have classified this as a smoky and peppery BBQ sauce instead of a hot sauce.
This is tasty stuff. There's an admirable balance of savory richness, sweet and chipotle-injected kick.
Taste on Food:
3.5 out 5. I poured a liberal amount of Splash over a rib-eye cooked medium/medium well. I figured beef would be a good candidate for trial as any condiment straddling the categories of pepper sauce, barbecue sauce and steak sauce ought to do well on it.
The chipotles offered up a tingly blanket of heat, while the acidity of the tomatoes and tartness of the vinegar played nicely with the sweet components and melded with the natural juices of the cow flesh. I thought it did as well as any mass-produced pepper sauce or steak sauce could do, but Splash didn't "wow" me. Instead, it performed its duty of complementing the steak without overpowering it and left me moderately sated.
Heat:
2 out of 5. The burn won't make most peoples' eyes water or tongues throb with excruciating pain. Yet if you're not used to the mid-level caliber singe of a chipotle or jalapeno pepper then this may be too much for you.
Label:
3 out of 5. This has a minimalistic look, with a gray/black background and a simple swirl logo. It would be easily recognizable on a store shelf, yet in a way looks too plain for me.
Overall:
Splash Chipotle Hot Sauce isn't going to appear on my top 10 sauces of 2010 list, yet I may buy this again. I would recommend it for those who crave smoky, non-offensive, middle of the road zest with a touch of fire on their meat and on Mexican food.
Splash Hot Sauce is available at http://www.splashhotsauce.com in regular 5 oz. woozy botle for $4.99 plus $2.99 shipping in the U.S.
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