If enjoy watching episodes of Hot Ones, you undoubtedly have enjoyed watching the contestants take on the hotter and hotter hot sauces until they get to the breaking point which is usually Da Bomb. I decided, why not take the challenge and see just how smoking hot their sauces can be. Hey Hot Ones, want to bring me in for the full 10 hot sauce gauntlet? I’m game.
The Video Review
I made my own wings using my crispy wings recipe and then we doused each wing in the hot sauce. Now for my normal wings that I make at home, we like the taste of Tapatio for our own sauce and it can be quite hot with our recipe so we’re no stranger to hot sauces for wings.
The classic hot sauce was quite mild. Barely even registered as being hot. The taste was fine, nothing to great but I did notice that this sauce was slightly sweeter than the hot sauces that we usually enjoy. It kind of reminded me of a tangy, slightly spicy, runny ketchup. Not my favorite sauce.
Stepping up to Tapatio was a bit of a step. It provides a good punch of heat and quite a bit of flavor as well. A nice bouquet of pepper flavor without much hint of vinegar or anything truly sour like you’d get with a Tabasco sauce. It truly is a delight.
The next step was to the Hot Ones Los Calientes Barbacoa version. This one tasted like a smoky, slightly sweet BBQ sauce that packs some heat. Think of those sweet BBQ hot wings but with a nice addition of burning in your mouth. It certainly isn’t the hottest burn, but the heat is absolutely noticable.
The fourth sauce in our line-up was Da Bomb. From watching the show I knew I was in for a bad situation with this sauce and it did not disappoint. The heat hits almost right away, there is no build up, there is no delay, it just burns your whole mouth. It is quite the spicy revelation. If you can handle spicy food, you’ll still want to stay away from this one since the flavor is quite awful. It’s like they take the peppers that make it hot and make it into a concentrate to improve the impact of the burning sensation without adding any help on the flavor. This is to spicy what lemon concentrate is to sour. Maybe you can take the heat, but with the taste of this one, you don’t want to. This is one experience I would not repeat, unless Hot Ones wants to put me on their show. Then I would go in full force again.
The last sauce in our line up was the last sauce in the Hot Ones line up for a while called Apollo. This sauce certainly packs the heat. It doesn’t feel hotter than Da Bomb because Da Bomb hits every last nook and cranny of your mouth, but it still brings the heat. The flavor of the sauce wasn’t terrible and it doesn’t detract from taking on a pure heat element. I have since added a few drops of it to my hot wings sauce that I make or any time I’m making a hot sauce because a few drops will bring the heat without altering the flavor of what your making. But for the time being, this is not a sauce I directly put on my food as the level of spice is extremely high and the flavor while not being bad, it not worth that level of spice unless you’re just trying to be macho.
If you want to know what questions were asked of me and what my responses were, then you’ll have to watch the video.
