On a semi-related note, if you're thinking about launching a new blog, try not to do it within three days of having a new baby, at which point most of your free time will be occupied with wiping other people's hineys, noses, mouths, and other interesting parts that you never really thought of as places that needed to be wiped before. It's also worth mentioning that new babies don't sleep, ever, for any reason, between the hours of 10pm and 5am, and consequently, neither do you. This can have any number of adverse affects on you as a writer, from the inability to focus on anything for longer than
Sorry, from the inability to focus on anything for longer than a few seconds at a time to the deterioration of brain function to the low point of actually giggling during late-night reruns of "According to Jim." (Midnight on CW15, unless you can find the remote.)
Fortunately, only the most basic of motor skills are required for tasting hot sauce, the main one being the ability to swat the bottle out of your toddler's hands when you leave it sitting too close to the edge of the table. Which I did, and which I did.
My biggest initial challenge when it came to Melinda's Original Habanero Extra Hot Pepper Sauce was not its formidable heat, but its bottle. The top is capped with this cutesy plastic funnel that is constantly clogged with huge glops of peppers, making it nearly impossible to get any of the hot sauce from the bottle to your food, which, from what I understand, is sort of the point. Although in retrospect, that might not be a bad thing, because …
Taste: Taste-wise, the hot sauce landed somewhere between "meh" and "OK-ish." There is a ton of lime and an overtone of carrots, which have as much business being in a food product as someone who tried to secede from the union has being in a presidential race. They belong in a category with cilantro and ginger as Foods You Only Serve People You're Too Passive to Poison. The internet tells me that carrots are a fairly common ingredient in hot sauces, although most brands have the decency to hide it. Melinda's garlic and vinegar are pleasantly subtle. The backbone of the flavor is the habanero, lying in wait behind the lime like a ham-fisted suckerpunch. The finish is all pepper, bold enough that it spiced up my food without hijacking it.
Burn: The Extra Hot Pepper Sauce kicks you in the teeth like a donkey, but the heat burns off quickly, and isn't nearly as savage as the sauce's name suggests. On a hotness scale of Gimli the Dwarf to Arwen the Elf, I'd give it maybe a Rosie, the cute hobbit bartender. Nerds, unite. Melinda's also makes an XXXtra Hot Sauce and, I'm not making this up, an XXXXtra Hot Sauce. Because sometimes three X's aren't enough to get the idea across. So presumably they're saving the real heat for those blends, as I will inevitably discover the next time my wife gives birth. But the heat of the Extra Hot sauce is still raging enough that eating it feels more like a sport than a leisure activity. You know when the Fellowship of the Ring is traveling through the mines of Moria and then Pippin knocks that dead soldier down the well and wakes up the Balrog and then the goblins attack them and Frodo gets speared by that cave troll? That cave troll is how I picture this hot sauce. Lots of muscle, not much dimension, and few marketable skills aside from its brute force.
Verdict: This hot sauce is good for a quick hit of fire, but is not a go-to sauce for flavor, on account of the blechiness. For now, hot sauce #1, Cholula, is the one to beat.
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