Rufus Teague - Blazin' Hot product reviews

So I have never been a fan of barbeque sauce. I have always found them to be far too sweet and tangy, that they have never really appealed to me. But I saw this 'Blazin' Hot' Sauce, and offered to give it a try and review it, not realising that it was a barbeque sauce.

I have actually found this sauce to be incredibly tasty. It has a bit of heat to it, that may give you a hiccup or two, but it doesn't linger, which is great. The heat counteracts the sweet and tanginess, that I generally dislike, and provides a fuller flavour. You get a good size bottle for the price, which is also great. Not too large, but not too small either.

I tried this sauce in a wrap with nothing more than some pan-fried chicken that I had cooked in some garlic and chives. It was incredibly delicious, and while the first bite included a hiccup, I did not regret my decision to add it to the wrap. I have in fact added it to every ingredient of every meal since then. As a New World shopper, I have never seen this brand before, neither have I seen any advertising for it, but it is proving to be worth the extra trip when I run out.

When this came up for reviewing I wasn't keen on it and so didn't originally request it, but when the team needed reviews for it I cautiously raised my hand.

Getting it, the first thing that I really liked about it was the bottle that it comes in, this will be a bottle that we keep without a doubt, it is a rather lovely bottle. My husband and I both put a dab of the sauce on a finger to give it a taste and my husband liked it whilst I could tell there was a good heat to it, enough to have me concerned that I wouldn't be able to handle it. Thus it took me a few days to figure out what to do with it.

One meal I used this for was on a toasted sandwich. Buttering the outside of the bread, a slice of cheese, some shaved ham, a little bit of mayo and some of the Blazin' Hot sauce. I was very cautious taking my first bite but I really enjoyed it, there wasn't as much heat to it as I thought there would be and it gave a lovely addition to the overall meal. My husband liked it just as equally and had we had the time we would have made ourselves a second toasted sandwich each.

Dinner we had pasta, vegetarian 'chicken' along with onions, garlic, pasta sauce and cheese, on top of spaghetti. The kids I dare not give them any so kept it out of the main dish but added some to mine and my husbands dish since I needed to give it a fair go. I would have only added just over a teaspoon worth to our dinner and that was the perfect amount, just the right add of smokey flavour added to the dish, a hint of sweetness and it was gobbled up rather quickly.

I decided to experiment with the sauce and managed to find a recipe online to make a cake using the sauce. A cake needing 1/4 cup worth of the sauce I was a bit more than a little concerned but thought there was nothing else to do so went into it full bore. The cake was a little dense but wonderfully so, almost a fudge cake, there was a hit of spice to it but nothing unbearable, and for extra pizazz I made some whipped cream and added some of the sauce to it as well. All together made a delicious cake that even my kids liked (minus the whipped cream) and it was so hard for me to resist having more, the sauce added a wonderful balance of smokiness, sweetness and flavour to the cake.

All in all this is a nice sauce and it will get used up without a doubt, my only gripe about it is that it has anchovies in it which means I can't treat my vegetarian mum to the sauce.

I have to start this review with a disclaimer. I LOVE spicy food (I make my own chilli sauce and usually use twice the amount of chills the recipe states) so I was really looking forward to trying out this Blazin' hot sauce.

I received the sauce the day I was making spaghetti bolognese so it was an obvious choice to add the sauce with the mince for some added flavour. Whilst the spice level is not quite up to what I would class as Blazin' hot, holy mother the flavour is amazing. IT has the right amount of smokiness and heat to add another dimension to just about any food, in fact I have added it to almost every meal so far since receiving it.

Second dinner on the list was poached chicken and the idea of a nice spicy poached chicken sounded great, so after adding about 2 tablespoons of the sauce into the poaching liquid, the chicken was then slowly poached for a few hours, now time for second disclaimer, my wife is not a fan of spicy food so at this point I took hers out and then added some more sauce to mine.
The wife loved the chicken and said while there was a fair bit of heat it was enjoyable. So even gets the tick from a non spice lover.

Third dinner was a curry mince, rather than plain curry mince I thought i'd spice things up for a lack of other words and add some Rufus Teague and make it into wraps with some Farrah wraps. Now this one was the biggest winner in the family, with a nice sour cream sauce mixed in it was the PERFECT layer of flavours, this sauce is made for being added to other flavours and doesn't over power the whole dish but adds that perfect spicy dimension to the food.

And last meal before writing this was this mornings breakfast. Every weekend I start the day with scrambled eggs and bacon, a drizzle of sauce over the eggs and marinading the bacon in the sauce was the ultimate kick up the jacksy for a saturday morning. This is an addition to the saturday ritual that will be staying with me for a long time. The spiced smokey flavour adds a complete new level of flavour to the bacon and the whole dish. the best part is you only use about a table spoon at a time so I can see this bottle lasting a good long time in this family.

The bottle itself is really appealing, nice and thin it takes up very little space in the fridge, the only downside of the bottle is the neck is maybe to small for the thick sauce, it does take a bit to coax out the sauce some times.

Overall I am really impressed with this sauce, whilst I don't quite agree with the words Blazin' Hot this is a perfect heat for anyone who can handle a bit of spice but likes to still be able to taste their foods. Will certainly be keeping this in the cupboard and very keen to try the other flavours that's for sure.

Until KIWIreviews offered up Rufus Teague sauces for review I admit I had never heard of them before. I am not a television watcher, partially because there is nothing worth while, but mostly because even though we have freeview and built in freeview etc, the signal is so poor we are rarely able to actually watch TV, so with this in mind, I had also never seen any advertisements for Rufus Teague sauces either. Which brings me to a little walk down memory lane

My father passed away just over a year ago, but when he was alive he used a word that used to drive me insane. that word was 'gooder'. I personally could not stand that word when my dad was alive, because it was not proper English. After he passed away, my kids, possibly unknowingly, started to also use the word gooder, rather than good, in their every day speech. And I was hearing it more and more everywhere I went, usually when I was having a down day and often on his monthly memorials. The day my parcel arrived from Kr, with the Rufus Teague sauce in it, I was having a particularly emotional day and I was missing my dad. So when I opened the package and found the sauce, I naturally turned the bottle over to read the label, and upon doing so, my day was instantly made better. You see the last lines of the label read:

"Good sauce makes bad barbeque good and good barbeque gooder". I admit I have accepted the word now

Feel good stories aside, I do not know how I have never heard of Rufus Teague sauces before, because man if I had, I am sure I would have tried them all before. I love bbq sauce, and I do not mind spicy foods (not to spicy though), and am always willing to give anything a go. This bbq sauce has such a wonderful smokey flavour. It is one of the nicest sauces I have tried. The heat however comes later, after you have already swallowed and appreciated the full flavour of this sauce, and so even though you know you are eating the blazin hot sauce, it still comes as a surprise because it is delayed. But it is still so good. I think the milder sauces would be really good, unless you are a huge fan of heat, because this sauce is great, but you don't scoff huge amounts of it, because of the heat, which also means it will last longer.

The price is also a lot more than what I would pay for a sauce, but also good value because of the richness and fullness in flavour, and the amount of sauce you get. I also love the bottle too, not your traditional sauce shaped bottle, which is really cool. I am definitely converted and if I can find who stocks these sauces down here in the deep south I will most definitely be trying the others.

First off I would like to say that I like things to be spicy but not necessarily stinking hot. What I found with this sauce is that it is a pleasant heat and not chilli hot such that one dab on your tongue will rip through your nose and throat making you cough instantly.

The bottle is a really nice thick and heavy glass hip flask shaped number, which goes well with the idea of it being born out of a backyard moonshine and crocodile hunting family. The label slightly misleads though. In the range there is already a hot and this one is supposed to be crazy depths of hell hot but unless the other one is really the hot one and this one is more the flavour hot and not hot for the sake of being hot I think we chose the right one.

I tentatively dabbed a small amount on my tongue and as with other hot things I have tried it didn't race through my sinuses. It just tasted like woodsmoked heat. I decided to try it on a burger which could be the ideal testing ground as it has the bread and lettuce and other cooling parts. I did not use it as liberally as I would mayo, but I did put about a teaspoon on the bottom bun and wiped it around.

The end result was really nice. You wouldn't have known where the gentle flavoured heat was coming from unless I told you because many meat patties taste similar when you add chilli to the mince when you are making them from scratch.

I would even go as far as to say if you were to heat a little olive oil in a hot pan and fry onions, you could add a dollop of this to make a really nice full bodied flavour base that would never be too powerful. If you decided to snatch a teaspoon of this from the bottle you may well find you have bitten off more than you can chew but I found this sauce to be a really nice well balanced condiment and cooking sauce alike.

I rate it highly only downing personal choice as I would not choose this flavour over the other flavours on the shelf in this range. Other than that it is very nice, I recommend you try it for yourself and not be scared of the label.