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TTF Ladies Review Series: Sauce Cartel Hot Sauces…Part 3
By admin | May 20, 2008 | 
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And now TTF brings you the final review in the Sauce Cartel Ladies Review series. Part 1 can be found by clicking HERE, and Part 2 by clicking HERE…Our guest reviewers for Part 3 is Heather from sopressata.blogspot.com, and the review duo from Florida, Winnie from Ass Murdering Hot sauce fame, and her good friend April.
Thanks to all who participated in this review series!!
Heather:
Green wave –
This is a great sauce. It is so enjoyable I’d suggest that Sauce Cartel start selling it in at least 10 oz jars. The peppery notes are the first thing you’ll notice upon smelling Green Wave, they hit the pepper just right in this sauce with both jalapeno and black pepper prominently featured. The second thing that I noticed about Green Wave was the slightly sweet taste of pineapple. The lighter citrus flavors of pineapple are the perfect foil to the darker, more complex pepper of the jalapeno. For those who don’t want to hurt themselves when eating hot sauce, this is great. You get a nice middle-of-the-tongue heat that just builds slightly the more you eat. As tempting as it is to eat directly from the bottle, I really wanted to use it in a way that highlighted the excellent flavors. Using the Green Wave, I came up with this recipe for fresh pineapple salsa:
2 cups diced fresh pineapple
1/3 cup diced red onion
¼ cup diced jalapeno
¼ cup chopped cilantro
Juice of 1 lime
2 tbs Green Wave sauce
Locura Mayan-
Locura Mayan really highlights Sauce Cartel’s flair for flavor. These guys aren’t afraid to make a really mild sauce, the complex flavors stand on their own, with no need to hide behind a million Scoville units. This sauce has a savory, smoky aroma, but that’s just where Locura Mayan begins. The balance between the smoky and sweet is what really stands out about this sauce. In the background there’s the magical complexity of sun dried tomato and the slight bite of vinegar. My husband commented he’d love to pour it on a Chipotle burrito. Hey Sauce Cartel – want to wholesale to Chipotle?
Heather Popio
Sopressata
http://sopressata.blogspot.com/
Winnie & April:
Intro: As a new comer to TTF and the industry, I would first like to take a moment to introduce myself and give a brief history of how I got here. I married a short bus rider that was involved, indirectly at the time, with the fiery foods industry. My Family has, over the last year and half, developed and released our first product to a wave of controversial reviews. My Husband recently got “officially” adopted by the short bus crew at TTF and our winders never looked cleaner. I am not a classically trained Chef but have cooked for all of my life for Family and Friends without the need of an evacuation receptacle (must be doing something right). Take any and all of my comments with a grain of salt or salt to taste as we like to say in the biz.
When I was initially asked to participate in an all female review of Sauce Cartel’s Green River and Locura Mayan hot sauces, I was a little reluctant but finally accepted the challenge. My hesitation with doing a review was in the fact that I experienced first hand how hard it is to bring a product to market and would never want to intentionally criticize someone on their efforts. On the other hand, if it were us, we would want someone to provide us with constructive feed back about our product so that we could make the necessary adjustments before we sank a lot of money into production and marketing. This is why we perform blind test before we ever finalize our recipe and, more than likely, why FKS sends out tons of samples of their prototypes.
For the review, I enlisted the help of my long time female friend April to either counter or validate my comments. We did not share our thoughts until the review was completed as we were told that this was expressly frowned upon by the omniscient Buddha; not to mention that we would be tarred and feathered. But I digress…
First Impressions: We both agreed that the labels were artistic in nature but somewhat vague in defining exactly what the consumer was purchasing. The Locura Mayan sauce does state that it’s “Salsa Caliente” which for those of us that don’t speak Spanish, means hot salsa; this will later cause further confusion after we sample the sauce.
I always love marketing that makes me explore a little and these labels had me on the webernet ahora mismo. Whether this was a conscience marketing strategy or just my overactive imagination, I give them Kudos for sparking my curiosity but also warn them that most people aren’t as intense of a Googler as I am. The Cartel should clearly define the purpose of their products on the front of the label if sales are important to them.
So what did I find in my exploration? I immediately went to their website: www.saucecartel.com, where I found a wealth of information about this mysterious company and what they had to offer. My exploration of their site also cleared up, to some extent, some of my initial confusion on their marketing strategy for their label designs. It appears as though they have developed a large collection of uniquely artistic label designs to coincide with their extraordinarily eccentric tasting sauces. The only thing that’s missing is a nice rack to display this large collection on but we’ll address that at the end of this review. Props to the Cartel for giving credit to the label artist because, speaking from experience, most companies disavow this knowledge and take all of the credit for the sauce’s success. The Sauce Cartel’s site also has some nice information about the history of the company, the artist, an e-commerce section where you can purchase their merchandise and even general information about the industry.
Now on to a deeper exploration of the sauce labels. Locura is a word that this Gringa was not familiar with so onward to Google Translating services where I found that it meant “madness”. Alright, that works with the label and satisfies my curiosity…now on to Green River which to me, is an enigma surrounded by a riddle on how this relates to hot sauce. My search produced a serial killer in Washington, a community in Wyoming and a Seattle band so this exploration produced absolutely nada of useful information. It probably just relates to the fun looking, toxic green color of the sauce.
Our first impressions of these sauces were good. Artistically they are attractive but should have been redrawn in a graphics program to bring out the colors, contrast, etc. during the printing process. The Green River sauce should have used contrasting colors to make the label POP! One last note, we loved the Sauce Cartel’s pepper mobster logo design; this, by far, impressed us more than either label design.
Smell: April and myself had virtually the same thoughts on the smell of these sauces. Locura Mayan definitely had a dominate Sun Dried Tomato and Chipotle smell. The Green River had a more exotic smell that mainly revolved around the vinegar and jalapeno peppers with a slight hint of the pineapple. Actually, the more I smelled into the Green River sauce, the more it smelled like a pretty good balance of all of the ingredients where as the Locura Mayan still had that heavy Sun Dried Tomato/Chipotle smell which is typical of these smoky flavors.
Texture: Green River reminded both of us of Gerber’s baby food but that’s probably because the Mothers in us. Both sauces had a texture that was slightly more liquid than a normal puree and there was a slight separation when they were poured onto a plate. Um, what the hell does texture really matter anyways as long as the stuff tastes good? We just put this into the review because it seemed to follow a lot of other review formats. On some level, I guess one could argue that texture is important because runny is psychologically associated with being watered down where as thicker sauces bring to mind a high quality product that’s full of delicious ingredients…regardless, we didn’t go there in this analysis.
Taste: Neither one of the sauces floored us with their taste but we applaud the Cartel for their courage in trying creative new ingredients. As they say, you have to break a couple of eggs to make an omelet and they have received some great comments from several respected people in the industry on their other sauces so by all means, sample their offerings and make up your own mind.
April and I agreed that the Green River sauce held more potential than the Locura Mayan in the taste category. I cooked chicken with Green River marinated on it and then served with a liberal amount dumped on it. Not bad…I would say this could be a decent cooking sauce if you wanted to try something a little different. I added capers later on and it seemed to give an interesting play on the sweetness of the sauce.
We were also in agreement that the Locura Mayan sauce was nowhere near a salsa and, in fact, reminded us of a very smoky marinara sauce or smoked tomato paste. This one just didn’t do much for either one of us. I’m thinking that you could mix this in an omelet and it would come out fairly tasty but for the price, I would opt for another product. Sorry guys…we’re not trying to be B*tches about this but we are absolutely certain that you could come up with something better than this and your sales would most assuredly reward you.
Heat: This is always a relative analysis but we tried to come up with a heat spectrum that everyone could understand. We developed the following 3 categories:
• Sissy Scale: If you’re scared of the Tabasco that most restaurants provide then this is your category.
• Mortal Scale: Most of the consuming public. Tabasco is good and they could tolerate heat that’s several levels higher.
• Extract Freak: Justin and other freaks of nature that like pure grain fire in a liquid form. Most people shouldn’t go here unless it’s a bet or a double dog dare and even at that, there should be a monetary award for the survivor.
The index for each category is -10 to 10 with the positive ten being the hottest and the negative ten being the weakest.
And without further adieu, the heat for each product is as follows:
Locura Mayan-
Sissy Scale: 1
Mortal Scale: - 5
Extract Freak: -10
Green River-
Sissy Scale: 5
Mortal Scale: 0
Extract Freak: -5
Conclusion: In the end, the Sauce Cartel is a promising company that takes culinary chances on their sauces and they should be applauded for that. Yeah they didn’t WOW us this time but we’re anxious to see where they will take us from here. Hopefully, we didn’t piss anyone off with our constructive criticism and we look forward to meeting the Cartel at some shows. Welcome aboard boys. Oh, I almost forgot….here’s our idea for a display rack for those sauces.
April’s Display Rack:
Related Posts
- TTF Ladies Review Series: Sauce Cartel Hot Sauces…Part 1
- TTF Ladies Review Series: Sauce Cartel Hot Sauces…Part 2
- The Scoville Brothers Hot Sauces Review #2
- Review: El Yucateco Green Hot Sauce
- Multi Review: Crazy Mother Pucker’s Habitual Jalapeno
Topics: General, Hot Product Reviews, Recipes, Reviews | 17 Comments »
Welcome to TTF!
Nice reviews ladies!
Nice tits too
Nice review ladies! Welcome to TTF!
Winnie, you’re dead on about the Myan with eggs. It’s really tasty with them. I think it has a unique taste that goes well with a lot of things, and usually hits the spot when I’m looking to use a mild sauce and not kill the food with heat.
For more heat and a very different unique flavor, get your hands on the Orange Explosion. My fav sauce from the Cartel. At least for now, still gotta try the Godfather sauce! The Orange Explosion is THE BOMB!
I love the display rack as well!!!!
Green River was actually named after the Chicago River during St. Patty’s Day. I grew up near there and that is where the nme came from Green River Killer is actually something we will be releasing at Jungle Jims…Was really hoping no one would put the 2 together before then…
Regarding the labels, I agree that they need to be recreated using a graphics program…Perhaps DK knows someone that can help with that. :?:
DK, your Godfather shipped on Monday…Are you going to open it? You know it is NOT mild right?
Question is Gary, will
open his?
Yup. As I will open the number #7 & #12 bottle I got from Torchbearer’s Super Sugarfire.
Nice review Ladies! Well done job, and I welcome you as well to TTF. Heather, that salsa recipe looks right down my alley. Yum.
Not if it’s signed and numbered!
Yeah that salsa looks pretty darn tasty.
I may have to give that one a whirl
Mine’s 8/13, not opening mine. I’ll have to get a regular edition to eat later.
Heather – that salsa looks great and I can see where Green River would taste great with that. Very creative…I’m gonna hafta try that.
DK – We have actually tried the sauces on a lot of different meals since this review was originally submitted awhile ago and have been impressed with how these sauces taste on different dishes. I’m not real big on Chipotle or smokey flavors and I believe April isn’t either so we were probably the wrong people to ask about the Locura sauce but it was pretty tastey with the omellete that I made.
Anyhow, we’re looking forward to trying the Orange Explosion especially after seeing how Heather is getting creative with these very unique sauces.
Thanks Gary & Sauce Cartel for allowing us to participate in the review of your sauces and I’m sure April will feel good about everyone liking her rack.
Damn you Google! Is nothing sacred?
Green river
Heather…nice review!! I’ll have to make the salsa recipe!! Sounds great!!
Winnie it’s too funny that you said the same thing I did about the baby food!! I like your heat scale!! Neat idea….I’ll keep that one in mind…great review!!
Great minds think alike. Sorry we didn’t get to talk last night because the boys were chatting away. I thought your naked sleep eating story was hilarious.
Next time I’ll get the phone away from Bill so we can talk some!! As soon as I heard him start talking about the sleep eating I had to wonder who it was!! Too funny!! Don’t forget to let us know where you’re staying for WOF!!