Andy Kern recommended the Rapture Trinidad Scorpion Pepper Hot Sauce to me. It’s a little on the spendy side, but I trust Andy’s opinions on this sort of stuff. So what does it bring to the table that you couldn’t replicate with pure cap?
Often many very spicy sauces taste chemically. That’s the capsaicin extract. The aim of a good sauce in my opinion should be that it still tastes like food, not a scrubbing acid. This is where some of the Dave’s Insanity sauces fall short. They’re spicy, but they’re not tasty. I don’t believe in the efficacies of “cleanses” so there’s not even that silver lining to ingesting lots of Dave’s.
The flip side is that many “spicy” sauces, often of the habanero brand, are lathered in various sweet syrups whose aim in my opinion is to mask the spiciness, but signal to people that you are into spice. Some element of sweetness may help in flavor, but it shouldn’t be the dominant aspect in most cases. Spice in my opinion goes well balanced with salty and sour flavors, but sweetness should be held in moderation. Different sauces have different temporal “profiles” based when the savory and sour and spicy “kick in.”
Rapture Trinidad Scorpion Pepper Hot Sauce does not have the problem of sweetness. It’s a genuinely spicy sauce that also tastes like a sauce and not a chemical. That is, it is “vegetably” if it makes sense (the fresh tastes of green Thai pepper come to mind to illustrate what I’m talking about). The spice kicks in immediately. For how spicy it is I don’t feel like the aftertaste of spice is too extreme (probably that suggests it’s a less oily sauce). The other flavors, a mix of sour and salt, with a touch of sweetness, have a longer amplitude, and leave more of an aftertaste.
Much respect to whichever saucier put this together. Overall I highly recommend thisRapture Trinidad Scorpion Pepper Hot Sauce , though I would caution that this is not for civilians. But it’s not insanely hot like the Final Answer.