Author: Scott Roberts

Sonoma, CA-based company Lucky Dog Hot Sauce is what Scott Zalkind started after his 6-plus-year hobby began to flourish. Zalkind fire-roasted chile peppers and garlic and combined them with other fresh ingredients into, in his words, “thick, savory and extremely versatile hot sauces” (that sounds good already!). He doesn’t use pepper mash at all; and although he employs a bit of dried chiles, most of the flavor is derived from the unique, quasi-smokey tones of roasted peppers.

I was eager to try these because of that fact. So were my friends Brian and Marilyn Meagher of Hot Sauce Daily, who agreed to post a review of their own of Lucky Dog Hot Sauces. So, after you read my take on these fiery products, I urge you to jump on over to their website to read what they have to say about Lucky Dog…

This one is pretty straightforward. Below are my picks for foods that I cannot stand or that I think are way overrated in standard Western cuisine. Unless stated as much, there may be exceptions to each one, so read my reasons carefully.

Chile Pepper Extract

With the advent of super-hot chile peppers like bhut jolokias (AKA ghost chile peppers), 7 Pots, Trinidad Scorpions, and the new Carolina Reapers, it’s SO easy to get extract-level heat (as long as we’re not talking about millions of Scoville Heat Units) in a hot sauce. Plus…those chile peppers can have an excellent flavor! Chile extracts are absolutely nasty, bitter, and chemical-like. Virtually all sauces that contain them are unsuitable for consumption. A note to hot sauce makers: don’t add extract; that era is over!

Olive Oil

There’s just the lightest touch of the bitter flavor of unripened olives that ruins this for me. Unless the EVOO is buried in certain recipes and dishes, this taste gets to me.

Horseradish and Wasabi

Now I can preemptively state that I like a little wasabi in my…

You think you’ve come across a great new product this year? I’m about to raise the ante on ya. This little baby was submitted to me a few months back by a fellow Missourian, Jay Abbey. It’s called Smoke Canyon Gourmet Smoke Roasted Jalapeno Sauce. I have to tell ya, this was so amazingly delicious that I almost devoured the contents of the entire bottle before I was able to get some photographs of it with some food. This is just one of those little revelations like a Ring of Fire or a 1498, that upon tasting it, you know you’ve struck gold. No, much more than that – a diamond mine!

What makes this sauce special is the miraculous performance it does as it straddles the line between have a fresh jalapeno flavor and a chipotle flavor. As you know, by its literal definition, that a “chipotle” is a dried, smoked jalapeno (although many sauce makers have broken that rule and have called just about any smoked chile under the sun a “chipotle”). To clarify, this is NOT a chipotle sauce, nor does it really have a heavy, smoky taste. Instead, perhaps like no sauce – or salsa – I’ve come across before, this really captures the distinctive tones of a roasted jalapeno chile pepper in a bottle. It’s a little smoky, somewhat “grill-like”, but it’s LOADED with huge flavor. And it’s vastly different than a lot of green/verde sauces you’ll find on the market, especially those that get their flavor profile from garlic, cilantro, and a combo of tart vinegary, almost “pickled” jalapeno components.

This product is the brainchild of Steve Seabury of High River Sauces (I had previously reviewed his Tears of the Sun Hot Sauce and Hellacious Hot Sauce), Ratt lead singer Stephen Pearcy, and Chef Chris Santos. Seabury has hit pay-dirt with the aforementioned condiments so I was excited to put his latest, High River Sauces Top Fuel Verde Sauce, out on the culinary race track.

There at times are products that have somewhat of an identity crisis. Whether intentional or not, a sauce may be marketed or is implied to be for a particular usage but in reality may be better as something else. I find that in the case of Top Fuel Verde Sauce. When I think of a “verde sauce,” visions of Mexican spin in my head. Yet this is NOT good for South-of-the-border fare.

Let me explain briefly that this sauce contains olive oil. Any number of varying types of oil in a pepper sauce are generally considered to be odd at best, and at worst forms an off-putting flavor and texture dynamic. There are a couple of well-known chileheads out there who have already expressed their displeasure with Top Fuel Verde Sauce because of that (and I’ll let them identify themselves if they chose), yet I think this sauce works if used with the right food. What is High River Sauces Top Fuel Verde Sauce suitable for? More on that later in the review…

Our story started approximately seven years ago. Still a burgeoning chilehead, I recall jumping on the non-defunct Hot Sauce Blog and seeing a posted notice that there was an offer out to get a free bottle of some new hot sauce called Tabanero. From what I recollect, I bought an issue of Chile Pepper Magazine (I was not a regular subscriber then) and took advantage of the “only pay for shipping” offer.

The bottle arrived in the mail a few weeks after. I remember that the label had the word “Tabasco” in additional to the name of the sauce (which is easy to guess that it’s a blend of “Tabasco” and “Habanero”), so what registered on my head? Yep, you guessed it…I thought this was an official McIlhenny Company product before closely examining the contact info on the label. I’m sure a lot of folks made that false assumption, perhaps not even knowing that there is a state in the country of Mexico called Tabasco, let alone a chile pepper with that moniker. (Yes, there was a label change following this initial shipment, possibly because they heard from McIlhenny’s attorneys.)

But back to the product itself. I took great pleasure in Tabanero’s citrusy tang, its sharpness and its fresh vegetable notes, not unlike Marie Sharp’s. In fact, it was this very sauce that I credit for making me fall head over heels in love with the “carrot style” hot sauce genre, with subsequent examples of the style being Benito’s Original Naranja Hot Sauce and Intensity Academy Hot Cubed.

From what I understand is that in the years since, Tabanero Hot Sauce Picante has been reformulated. Let’s see if it still has both a uniqueness and a familiarity I once was crazy about…

Many people know me as a huge Eddie Van Halen fanatic, with him influencing me both as a guitarist and as a non-musician (I at one point maintained three different VH websites – VHTrading.com. VHFAQ.com and VHGuitar.com).

Yet at one point there was someone else who inspired my playing just as much as Eddie. That person was the late, great Randy Rhoads.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, here’s the condensed version. Randy cut his teeth at his mother’s music school while playing in the local L.A. music scene. He was a founding member of Quiet Riot, and left that band after ripping out two albums with them (and before they recorded their multi-platinum breakthrough Metal Health) to join Ozzy Osbourne’s new solo outfit after he departed Black Sabbath in 1979. Randy became Ozzy’s main man and songwriting partner, and together they forged instant metal masterpieces in the early ’80s with Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman. Both of these records, with help of Van Halen’s early material, created a blueprint of what guitar-dominated hard rock with be for the next 10 years…