The Chilli Pepper Company Part II: The Beast

Being an economic type, when I decided to avail myself of The Chilli Pepper Company's Naga Viper/Terminator sauce, I felt honour bound to buy something else to justify the packaging and transport costs. Scanning their extensive list, I picked one more or less at random: "The Beast" (reviewed by Darth Naga at the ChileFoundry here).



I mentioned in the last post about how I'm not overly fond of the overly bloke-y trend in naming chilli sauces - at some point I might get round to putting together a commentary post on the issue - and this sauce (and many of the others like it) come across as kinda cheesy. Still, it's not about the name, it's about the sauce.

It's also worth highlighting that the CPC a company that seems to principally grow many varieties of chillis (check out their awesome array of seeds and powders for sale), and has been placing more and more emphasis on producing really hot chilli sauces without using extract (a la the super-hot ranges from Dave's Gourmet, Blair Lazar and Hot Headz). Their rumoured success in breeding a super-hot variant of Naga (the so-called "Viper") will certainly help them in this endeavour. But how does the Beast weigh up?

Tasting Notes: The first thing that hits me is the sweet, spicy flavour; fruity with a strong cinammon note and a pleasant undercurrent of vinegar. It smells, basically, like a english chutney. The sauce was runnier than I was expecting (given I was expecting chutney after that lovely smell!), but the flavour really doesn't let it down. One of the key ingredients in this sauce is mango, and that really forms the sweet and sour core of the flavour. The spices are strong and pleasant too. One minor gripe is that the flavour is a little raw, but heck, it's a sauce - very few of them stand up well to necking the bottle. The chilli comes in quite late, strong and low, but stays with you.

What's it Good For: It's got a complex, spicy, chutney-ish flavour that would be completely wasted in cooking, so that's out from the start. I've used it on cheese-on-toast, but it'd be worth going for a mild cheese so that you get the most of it's flavour. I've also found it's quite nice added to a simple salad dressing to give it a bit of kick - probably best with something like a balsamic dressing that doesn't have a complex flavour of it's own. Like chutney, it's good on cooked meats and in sandwiches, but for me it suffers for being just a bit too runny. Given it has enough of a flavour to stand on it's own, the best thing I've found for it is leftover boiled rice (probably a bit much to make a whole meal out of, but with a mixed into a tablespoon or so of rice makes a very nice side). It's a versatile condiment, and I'm very sad at how fast I'm getting through it!

Final Thoughts: I really love this sauce. Given it was filler on my order, I'm really pleased at discovering it, and next to the slightly disappointing Terminator/Naga Viper, I'm really happy with it. (May even buy again, if I get the chance!) The only niggle flavour-wise is how raw the vinegar and spices taste. I noticed this about the Terminator too; both sauces leave me with the feeling that these are "home-made" small batch sauces (certainly compared with bigger labels like Blair's or Tabasco). If there were some way to take the edge off it without killing the lovely flavour, this sauce would be more or less perfect.

There is, however, one nagging problem which I really have to flag up. Upon re-reading Darth Naga's take on this excellent sauce from December 2009, I found this:

I undid the bottles cap and held it to my nose [...] Naga. Thats it, seriously! I can just smell pure naga coming from this bottle.

I've been sniffing this sauce again for the last half hour, and chilli is definitely not the dominant smell coming off it. This isn't a bad thing, of course - as I've said, I love it - but it's hard to escape the fact that this seems to be a different sauce from the one that D.N. is reviewing. Also, after the stern warnings on the side of the bottle ("Extremely hot... Use where extreme heat and flavour are required" "BEWARE!! Once eaten this will hurt") I have to say I was disappointed by how mild this sauce was. This sauce is probably comparable in heat to Tabasco. At first I thought it might be because I was tasting it straight after this, but subsequent tastings have disabused me of that notion - my bottle of this sauce is just not that hot, despite boasting that it contains "13 fresh Naga Morich per bottle". Again, CPC is primarily a chilli farm with a sideline in making sauces with their produce: I'm not sure if this points to variation in the heat of their Naga's or batch variation between sauces, but it's worth saying that when it comes to heat, your mileage may vary. Caveat emptor and all that. But hey, if all you want is heat, this probably isn't the sauce for you anyway.

The Verdict: This is a really great, flavoursome sauce, and definitely worth the postage cost.

The Chilli Pepper Company Part I: The Terminator

I'd like to say that the recent hiatus has been because I was saving myself for something special, but in reality I'm just a massive pile of procrastination. Still, I've eventually succumbed to the tasty delights of an internet chilli sauce order, in the form of two lovely sauces from the Chilli Pepper Company. I confess to being a giant sucker for hype in almost everything that I go after, and after some kerfuffle on the intertubes about a strain of chilli bred specifically for hotness and dubbed the "Naga Viper". Individual peppers are being touted as the hottest on record, hitting 1.3 million scoville's (although the folks at the CPC are cautious about their claims). To put this in perspective, the hottest sauce I own (Da' Bomb's the Final Answer - review forthcoming - which is basically pure extract) only just pips it, racking up 1.5 million SHU's.

The Naga Vipers aren't generally available yet (although chilli veteran Darth Naga from the ChileFoundry scored a couple with horrifying results), but the CPC are making a minimalist chilli sauce made with the Vipers and the current heat record holder, the Bhut Jolokia. As I was going through a periodic extreme heat phase when I saw the ChileFoundry video, I jumped at the chance to grab a bottle of the stuff, which was sadly delayed for almost a month. In that time, the indefatigable Darth Naga not only reviewed the sauce, but managed to convince the CPC to change it's name to reflect the growing internet fame of the superhot Naga Viper chilli. As he remarks, my bottle of "The Terminator" is now limited edition, since the sauce is now simply called "Naga Viper" - however the contents remain the same.



I've been a fan of the "minimalist" sauces for a while now. The Godfather of hot sauces, Tabasco, also has only three ingredients (cayenne peppers, vinegar and salt), and in my opinion still holds it's own against other sauces, but my interest in them was reinvigorated by the South Devon Chilli Farm's impressive range of single variety sauces. For that reason, I had high hopes for this one.

For the record, I prefer "Naga Viper". There's a tendency with hot sauces to give them obnoxiously laddish names, which really puts me off. But I'm not here to review the CPC's branding choices, I'm here to review some chilli sauce. So let's go!

Tasting Notes: Much like Tabasco and the SDCF sauces, this is an incredibly runny sauce, but has a fairly rough chilli mash in it. The nose is chock full of that unique Jolokia smell. Having got my mitts on a few fresh Dorset Naga's from Tesco since I reviewed the Dave's Gourmet Ghost Pepper Sauce, it's interesting to go back and compare the two sauces. The Terminator has a great freshness to it, and really captures the complexity of the Naga flavour, wheras the Dave's Gourmet sauce seems to be trying to shoehorn it into a Habanero-ey flavour. Since the peppers are clearly distinct, and the CPC sauce does more justice to the distinction, I'm inclined to come down on it's side. But then, is the flavour of the raw chilli really that good a thing? I'll confess, I'm slightly coming down on my "Naga's, f*** yeah!" phase and trying to decide what I really make of them. Naga's definitely have a slightly more floral, almost soapy quality to them over other C. chinense varieties, like the Hab's, which is quite pleasing to smell, but the jury's still out on whether it makes for good eatin'. But at any rate, this sauce does what it's supposed to, which is to showcase the fruit's unique flavour. Surprisingly, since vinegar is the only non-chilli ingredient, the sauce doesn't strike me as that sharp. The flavours of the fruit really take the fore in this sauce, and the taste really does do justice to the nose. On the down side, that flavour comes with a strong bitter taste, which rather spoils the effect. But it has to be said, this sutff really does pack a punch - taken neat it will leave a burn in your mouth long after you've swallowed it. In pure kicking power, this one can easily hold it's own against extract sauces.

What's It Good For: Surprisingly, given how hot it is, it seems to lose it's raw killer potency pretty quickly. I suspect drizzling it directly on to your chips might be a bit of overkill, but I've used it in most of the ways I use Tabasco with a fair success; in soups, on pizza, stirred into leftover rice from an indian curry. The floral taste of the Naga's is lovely, although it still has a bit of an acrid tang to it (I'm not sure whether this is the vinegar or an effect of the raw chilli pepper). At any rate, you'll probably only need a dribble of the stuff at a time, and it should last you.

Final Thoughts: Since Naga/Bhut Jolokia/Morich's are the sexy-sexy-hot-hot thing at the moment, I really really want to like them, and this sauce makes a fair stab at presenting the new generation of super-hot-right-off-the-vine chilli's in a simple sauce. But somewhere in me I'm wondering whether I really like the flavour of the Indian C. chinense varieties as much as the richer, darker flavour of Caribbean chilli's like Habanero's. (There's some suggestion that a few interesting varieties from Trinidad are about to make waves, but they haven't made their way into any sauces yet!). Still, it's probably not fair to fault the sauce for the failings of the fruit it's made from. Still, the Terminator/Naga Viper sauce does have some failings. It has upsettingly acrid notes running through it that are sadly quite hard to ignore, and I'm not sure that's just from the shocking heat of it's fruit. With the breeding of a fruit that is apparently four times as hot as Dave's Gourmet Insanity Sauce, and the bottling of a minimal sauce that's squarely in the super-hot category, I can't help thinking that this is a game changer for the super-hot market, with heavily extract-based sauces outclassed by simpler, cheaper, more flavourful sauces. Time will tell.

I made the comparison of these "simple sauces" to Tabasco at the top - well, Tabasco isn't quite as simple as it's ingredients list suggests, being aged in oak to give it a lovely mellow flavour. I really wonder what a gourmet sauce would result if the Naga Viper sauce was treated in such a way; it might well loose it's trademark pungency, but would it smooth out the flaws in it's flavour? We will probably never know.

The Verdict: All in all, this is a damn good Naga sauce, and I'm sure I'll reach the bottom - eventually.