Gross Food Week #7: Walden Farms Calorie Free Marshmallow Dip

Ah, yes, Walden Farms. We used to go there on field trips when I was a waifish little girl. Take a stroll past the emaciated cows, lowing for calorie-free feed and water as the calorie-free breeze blew gently on your face. Old Farmer Walden would strap up ol' Treadmill, the starving mare, and we'd take a ride around the field, its crops skinny and sexy as always, the abundant corn and wheat sheaves nearly translucent after shedding all those calories.
Those were the good old days, and no trip would be complete without a taste of Mrs. Farmer Walden's special calorie-free marshmallow dip. Of course, this was before WalCorp bought out the farm, but it was just as heavenly as it could be- just like the real, horrifically fatty obese child snack, only...more wholesome. Ha ha, no it wasn't. I'm just screwing with you. In fact, this has the air of a product made prior to a big corporate buy-out. With its incredibly precious label and short ingredient list, it almost does look like something that an ingenious housewife would whip up in her kitchen, until you open the jar. Shit is downright chemical.
For a brief, miserable summer, my dad decided to teach me some of the basic intricacies of home repair. One of the only things I retained from that summer was how to properly wield an axe to chop firewood, how to perfect my summer burn while lounging outside watching actual home improvement workers do their jobs, and how to use caulk in a small imperfection in an area. Lest you underestimate my mettle, know that this is typical behavior. Because this post isn't about calorie-free axe murder or harassing working people, let's see if you can figure out where this is heading. Caulk is not edible, but appears to be. But if you're a closeted pica sufferer, I've got great news: Walden Farms Calorie Free Marshmallow Spread is as close as you can get to legally ingesting caulk, and it's sort of, kind of, real food.
Let's get the legal mess out of the way: according to the FDA guidance, compliance, and regulatory information, chapter 9, appendix A, the definitions of nutrition claims, a product is able to state that it is "calorie-free" if it has 5 or less calories per serving. You will receive no legal compensation for ingesting eighty jars of this and getting fat. But it's not even worth your zero to five calories per serving. With a perpetually cold, thick texture, like cold cream without the lingering scent of baby powder, and a pure white color that absorbs all darkness and shadows, it's definitely providing all of the defensive indicators to alert you not to consume it. But we forge on, as always. It has a congealed, wet smell like molding wood, with a harsh sugary edge behind it, like the sweet powdered sugar and corn starch scent on marshmallows. It's not quite a solid and yet too gelatinous to be a liquid, and falls off both spoons, knifes, and fingers, leaving a watery, chalky smear of a trail in its wake. Think saturated marshmallows that have taken a trip down the river, capisce?
The flavor is downright abrasive, with a hideous gloppiness, like poorly cooked pudding, that doesn't disappear once placed on the tongue. It's similar to taking an injection of Splenda right into the vein. Any trace of vanilla that was once in this, or at least near this, was absorbed by the great white mass and spat out into the ether, never to be seen again. The flavor is part synthetic and part Elmer's glue, with an emphasis on the latter. It's heinous. There's no better way to tell you. It's nothing like marshmallows, dip, or marshmallow fluff, which I took out to remind myself what real fake marshmallow spread is like. Phew. This product isn't worth saving its exaggerated, implausible claim of 330 calories a day. You're better off eating actual caulk and sealing your own mouth shut. I'm just thankful I didn't spring for the zero calorie peanut butter and make myself a FlufferHater sandwich.

Gross Food Week #6: Nexcite

I suppose I've developed a little reputation for myself. The Huffington Post described us as "no holds barred," while my own family took the more direct approach and wondered if we weren't "pushing the line." Frankly, I just like to think of myself as the girl who tried all of the carbonated sexual aphrodisiacs the world has to offer. Simple pleasures, that's what defines me.
This particular beverage came to the United States by way of hatred and copyright infringement in equal doses. Nexcite, a whimsical Swedish penis pumper, is a soda designed to provide a proprietary formula of herbal extracts and caffeine with which will fuel your manbits like no other. Like no other, I say! And because it was fifty cents on clearance and had a rabbit on the label, I tried it for you today. The soda is Viagra blue and smells like an energy drink, if an energy drink was consumed by a toddler and vacated with 50% more melted blue Jolly Ranchers than it originally contained.
It just leads me to wonder, why oh, why would the manufacturers of this drink make it bright blue and candy-scented? With its cute bunny logo, it's just asking to be guzzled by a small child. Or worse yet, it's all getting clearer to me now. With its emasculating smell and antifreeze pallor, it's the perfect way to get a little kink into the bedroom by tricking your man into thinking he's about to down a shot of Prestone. The five supplements, not to be confused with the fifty ways to leave your lover, which yours will undoubtedly do after watching you wince this down, are as follows: Yerba mate, an herb traditionally used in hot tea, which everyone knows makes you look brooding and sensitive, damiana, nature's off-brand Viagra, illegal in Louisiana, ginseng and guarana, everyone's favorite acid-flavored energy drink supplement, and last but not least, schizandra. This is not a Mary Sue-esque Final Fantasy character as I initially thought. It's a Chinese berry that aids in soothing the symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. How sexy is that?
Nexcite tastes like the darker side of liquified cotton candy and green tea mixed together at a frat party. It's both bitter and overly sweetened and as a flavor best described as being throat-punched by a lime, with a potently sour aftertaste like a Warhead. Extremely sugary, in a weird way that sticks to your gums and works its way into the crannies of your mouth, like sexual harassment for your teeth. It numbed my taste buds for a good ten seconds after each sip, which I suppose aids in diffusing some sexual tension if you're not sure of, how shall we put it, the provenance of some particular after-dinner treats you may partake in. This'll fix you good. In regards to the state of my sexual performance prior to and after consuming this drink, I can't tell you if it helped. I was too busy looking slack-jawed at the recommendation on the side of the bottle: "As a supplement, drink 1-8 bottles a day." Holy crap, Nexcite, I'm a woman, not a machine. Here's to drinks directly fueling the sex working industry, one male gigolo at a time.

Gross Food Week #1: The Original Hooters Medium Wing Sauce

HOOTERS WHHHYYYYYYY???

Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system. With that exuberant commencement speech, let us begin Gross Week 2012. Today's selection embodies all of the principles that I consider to be important for this theme week, namely, that it is a proudly licensed product aggressively marketed by its source and even touted as "secret", that it is a disturbing shade of nuclear hazard orange, and that it was 99 cents at a grocery clearance store. The fact that it is not, like so many products at this store, past its sell date should give you a taste of its quality already.
Where to begin? There's just so much to cover on the label alone. Let's start with the lusty endorsement from the Hooters owl himself, "A thrill on the grill BBQ!" It doesn't take a professor with a Ph.D in Lolology to figure out how Engrishy that is. Despite my suspicions that this was some sort of perverted and failed test item, it turns out that Hooters still makes this sauce, selling it for a mere $7 on the interwebz, and still employs this awful catch phrase. Reading further, I caught the official Hooters logo emblazoned no less than four times on the jar. Either they're trying really, really hard to prevent copyright theft or they're actually proud of this product.
The directions on the side (whose inaccuracies I'll later explain) also provide a list of recommendations of foods with which you can drown in this sauce. Surprisingly, slathering the sauce on the breasts of an after-hours Hooters waitress is not one of them. There goes my bucket list. The cooking process sounded easy enough- fry up some wings, toss them in the sauce, enjoy with a side of classified ads to wipe away the tears and excess dribblings. Not so terrible, right?

AHHHHHHHH
AHHHHHHHHHHH
AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Oh my god, it's like the bastard child of napalm and nacho cheese. My hatred for Robin Williams and Spy Kids has nothing on this one. I think you get the picture. Yep, nasty surprise number two- the sauce had the texture of cold margarine and the smell of gasoline, Tabasco, and melting plastic. This in no way felt like something I should have put near my face, much less ingest. And I haven't a clue why the instructions said to shake the jar first- it's about as productive as shaking a jar of peanut butter. But readers, like a dutiful serf, what I do, I do for you. And so I began the process of cooking my wings.
I decided to try this on both breaded and non-breaded wings to get an idea as to how it adhered to the chicken. Huge mistake on my part. On both applications, the sauce had the softness of warm yogurt and melted like butter on toast. On the pieces of unbreaded chicken, it left no more than a slick trail on the skin and clumped at the bottom of the plate, and on the breaded pieces, it melted into the nooks and crannies and separated almost immediately after sticking on. It felt like the sauce was too runny to handle any temperature above lukewarm, yet was so congealed in its original form that it was also unable to function as a dipping sauce.
Once the wings were no longer molten and ready to eat, the sauce returned to its original liquid consistency, that of a melted almond bark coating, and shellacked the wings to the plate, rendering them mere components in a disgusting and inedible art project and requiring the force of a fork and knife to remove them from their glued-on state. Taking this photo was easy as they remained preserved in their original positions on the plate, held upside down, for over two minutes.
It tasted rancid. This is exactly the kind of product that aspires to be a hot mess and fails miserably. There was literally no element of this that made it appear edible, much less palatable. The heat is warm, but no warmer than a hamburger sitting next to a bottle of mediocre hot sauce and certainly not at the level of any Buffalo wing you'll find at a sports bar. It has an oily, thick consistency not unlike facial cream, were said facial cream purchased at a dollar store and had a slight numbing effect on the lips. It tastes predominantly of vinegar and Crisco with an aggressively salty bite and leaves a buttery slick all the way down the throat. The sauce had the unique ability to permeate through even the thickest flour breading on a wing, saturating the meat so with its liquid ass flavor and rendering every single wing I made inedible. Lest you worry that I went hungry, I thankfully deployed my backup wing supply with a hot honey and red pepper flake sauce and ate them with gusto.
Congratulations, Hooters. In the world of successful marketing vehicles, this sauce is the abandoned flaming Pinto on cinder blocks with a tarp and headless doll in the trunk.

Le Whif Chocolate Inhaler

To some of you, this may have come as a painfully apparent "DOOOI" moment, but to others, this might be a shock. Brace yourself. I was kind of a loser in high school. I know this is somewhat shocking being that I've presented myself as an awesome person on the internet. Shocker! You must think I'm like currency- legal and tender. But in reality, that's a little far from the truth. This anxious undercurrent of a subject matter may spring from the fact that I'm going home in a few days after defriending over 300 assholes on my Facebook and, due to Murphy's Law, will inevitably encounter at least eight of them while getting coffee and will have to endure awkward conversation and remind myself that I did what I did because I hated them.
I wish I had had Le Whif in high school. At least then I could have pretended to be edgy. It's the perfect amount of sleek, oily pretension combined with the allure of snortable drugs but- psyche! It's really chocolate. If I'd had asthma as a child, the irony of having this match my inhaler yet also be off-limits because of its powdery properties would not have escaped me. Le Whif is so impossibly vapid that even I, Lord of the Guise, must avert my eyes to its monochromatic color scheme and stupid "eating by breathing" mission statement. Seriously, Le Whif, you look like a tampon. You need to check yourself before you wreck yourself.
While I can't honestly say this is the most embarrassing thing I've crammed in my mouth (that honor wholeheartedly goes to Kush Cakes) it's certainly the most awkward. It's a cross between a cigarillo and a plastic party noisemaker. And worse yet, you're supposed to smoke it as though you were smoking a hand-rolled clove cigarette- gingerly, with a slight air of disgust. Below are a few recent installments I like to call "Faces of Le Whif." They should give you a pretty good idea as to how we liked this.
I feel like a thirteen year old sneaking a smoke behind the bleachers for the first time, except this isn't a Virginia Slim and I don't feel cool at all. Despite the reassurance that the chocolate particles were too large to enter my lungs at 80 to 300 microns, I still feel like this crappy chocolate is bouncing around my respiratory system. After hacking up a Hershey's bar, I tasted it. It has the unmistakable flavor of crappy, unsweetened baking chocolate and granulated sugar- grainy, with a bitter and undersweetened flavor, a predominantly fake molasses and brown sugar taste.
It's like eating cocoa powder and Splenda, but with the added humiliation of sucking it through a patented device. Ick. It had a harsh, burning texture and left my throat feeling raw. All the thrill of a real cigarette with none of the Bond-level suavity or satisfaction. Also, it leaves a dirty, brown residue on the mouth of the depositor, a fine dust which inevitably gets all over your clothes and then melts for real.
There are absolutely no redeeming qualities to this product. Chocolatiers have scaled down their regular bars to make 100-calorie bars for the calorie conscious, and as far as I can tell, nobody has explicitly expressed a desire to breathe in their food. Perhaps this is a good chocolate "hit" for the stereotypical Hollywood female workaholic, but Jesus, so is a Tootsie Roll. Leave Le Whif in Le Trash and go drink some chocolate soy milk.

Cawy Watermelon Soda

Outside of food writing, I wouldn't say that I indulge in the most normal of hobbies. I'm an amateur moped tinkerer, an ex-guitarist, French history buff, and occasional organic chef. I take my wines in quality over quantity and I drink my scotch neat. My ultimate goals for life are to proceed living in a hedonistic, yet annoyingly successful manner similar to Josh Kilmer-Purcell, Cameron from Modern Family, and the butt of all lawyer jokes. As I'm writing this opening paragraph cum witty personal ad, perhaps the one hobby I've kept most under wraps over the last few years is my propensity for collecting weird sodas and potato chips. My favorites include freaky international flavors, and wacky racial stereotypes.

That's right. The photo we didn't take.

Looks like Hatermelon, son.



Back in February, Rusty at Tampa Bay Food Monster sent a whole box of awesome foods, beverages, alligator jerkies, and a large-ass cigar of unknown provenance. One of the enclosed sodas was this watermelon monstrosity by Cawy, a company based out of Miami producing flavors like Quinabeer, fruity cola, Champ's cola, and the depressingly named Coco Solo to go with your chili for one. The watermelon soda smells like a potent combination of watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers and Calgon bubble bath. Not so oddly enough, it tastes like that, too. It's predominantly soapy in flavor, with a weird, bitter creaminess. The aftertaste lingers on the tongue like soap, though thankfully without leaving a slick sheen on the inside of the mouth. That doesn't save it from tasting like absolute ass, though. You'd think 200 calories and 50 grams of sugar would be able to help it along, but no dice. The sweetness was muted in the mixture of chemical flavors and colors. This soda is gross and creepy.

You'll be pleased to know, though, that in addition to making a fine piece of wall art in your home, the soda can offers a plethora of educational activities along its circumference, much like a cereal box or tattooed penis. For instance, one side of the can will teach you the French translation for "watermelon ass soda," and the top of the can offers an edifying opportunity to have a real life e-web internet World Wide pen pal by simply emailing cawy@cawy.net! Perfect for little sheltered kids and lonely housewives. There's even a coloring section provided you choose the non-racial androgynous boy label. Fun for the whole family. I'm done, I can't do this any more. This soda has literally stabbed me in the throat and watched me bleed. Literally.

SNACKDOWN: Healthy Choice vs. Lean Cuisine in Battle Ravioli

Here at Chez Love, we are no strangers to the delicacy of the frozen meal. Many a night has been saved by the good graces of an Amy's frozen pizza or a pint of ice cream. So when we saw these two varieties of gourmet ravioli, we knew a snackdown was in order.The two varieties wouldn't have seemed out of place on the menu in a nice restauraunt. Lean Cuisine boasted a pumpkin ravioli with creamy sauce with walnuts, snap peas, and carrots, while Healthy Choice gave us a lobster cheese ravioli with green and yellow zucchini in a vodka sauce. Both sounded excellent and filling for a cold night.Unfortunately, we couldn't stomach sampling more than a bite of each. While each was visually appealing- the LC's julienned cuts of vegetables and the HC's hearty portions, the flavors were each abominable in their own ways. Let's take a journey into the world of Healthy Choice. The ravioli in this dish were mushy with a crumbly, powdery filling and leaking fishy fluid that completely saturated the rest of the dish with a strong canned seafood flavor. When I tasted the vegetables with sauce alone, despite seeing a firm, colorful piece of zucchini, all my mouth could think was "FISH" and resisted my every attempt to shove it in there. The sauce, which had come out of the microwave thick and rich-looking, was runny when I sat down to eat and also tasted like fish. A quick look at the ingredients showed that one of the main offenders was "pollack powder," and after that, the only thing I could associate this was fish food and worse, the flakes that fish food comes in. No thanks.After that, I was looking forward to trying the Lean Cuisine, but Keepitcoming told me not to waste my taste buds. The crisp, colorful vegetables were drowned in the "creamy" sauce, or in our case, the salty sauce. It was an assault on my blood pressure. For some reason, both of these dishes contained an ingredient or component that made it impossible to taste anything else. The ravioli in this dish was on the other end of the spectrum- too firm and almost chewy, with an acidic, yammy flavor to its filling. This was a particular shame, as the dish itself was really pretty.

Unfortunately, we have no winner. The real winner is the pizza we picked up shortly after! Better luck next time. Expect more frozen food offerings in the future...

Philly Cooking Creme Italian Cheese and Herb

I am not a busy mom. I don't find myself waiting hand and foot on a hungry husband and rushing my children to oodles of activities. My entire life is one big "me time" and I rarely find myself in a dilemma when the time comes to cook dinner for more than one person.

And yet, I found myself drawn to Philadelphia Cooking Creme.Maybe it's because I'm a college student, but I never blink at the opportunity to add cream cheese to food. And being that this was one of Philadelphia's biggest advertising campaigns yet, how could I not try it? The marketing really confines it to a very specific demographic: if you're incompetent at cooking and find yourself literally paralyzed by anxiety over reading a cookbook, this supplement is for you. I can't bring myself to call it a sauce, nor can I call it a creme, because thick, white, gooey stuff that smells funny just doesn't do it for me.
Philly's phinest comes in four flavors, Italian Cheese and Herb (herb singular), Santa Fe Blend, Savory Garlic, and Original. My grocery store only carried two of the four, so I opted to try the Italian Cheese and Herb. Upon opening the package, only one thought entered my mind: is it possible this has gone bad? It couldn't have been- it had only been released less than a week ago. It made no sense. And yet, the texture was grainy and inconsistent, too wet and too pungent. When we tasted it, it was acerbic- that generic herb blend rearing its ugly head, and the "Italian cheese" was mainly just cream cheese. Cream-a chees-a, if you will.
However, it goes without saying that you have to cook with it before you eat it, thus damning this to the unitasking products we so loathe here at Foodette Reviews. It's a one trick pony. You can't spread this on your bagel or mix it in with your quiche. It's a sauce, damn it, and it's not going to pander to anyone else's needs. So with that in mind, we tried it in three applications- as a breakfast food in eggs, as a lunch with a chicken burrito, and as dinner, with homemade gnocchi and meatballs. All three of them vastly disappointed us.
The eggs were probably the biggest failure, as we love to mix a little sour cream or cream cheese into our morning omelettes to make them creamy and fluffy. Cooking creme, however, made us feel like we were being molested by our morning eggs, rendering them grainy and seizing them up, tasting more like school lunch eggs from a military issued brown box than Mark Bittman's low and slow method. The herbs overpowered all other flavors, the scariest being the smoky paprika I added at the end. If a chemical, er, supplement is so powerful that it overwhelms DJ Smoky P, we're in serious trouble. All "creamy" elements of the sauce disappeared or dissolved into the eggs, leaving nothing more but a slimy trail at the bottom of the pan.With the burrito, the cooking creme was the most successful. Granted, that's like giving an award to the best five inch penis in the world, but I digress. I cooked up some chicken in a pan and added about a tablespoon of cooking creme. It cooked and sizzled with the chicken, but ended up browning at the edges. In the minute or so that I sauteed it for, it managed to reduce itself to a milky, watery liquid that barely adhered to the chicken at all. This completely defeated the purpose of being a sauce, because a sauce is supposed to stick to whatever you're using it on, and made it more of a marinade. That being said, a bulk of the graininess was cooked off, and it seemed more mild in a burrito setting. My main complaint, aside from the texture, was how bland it made everything look. That's partially our fault because we think that keeping vegetables around the house is a carnal sin, but it wouldn't hurt to have some small pieces of green and red peppers to enhance the creme. This may provide comfort for people with bland dietary restrictions or infants, but it was rather unpalatable for us.
The pasta and meatballs was a toss-up, because we only added a tablespoon to an entire pound of gnocchi along with a whole jar of pasta sauce. Any effects the creme had were negative. It blended in with the sauce until it was relatively unoffensive, yet still retaining that dastardly generic herb bitterness, and made the leftovers strangely clumpy. It really seems to defeat the purpose of using it as a sauce when you add a mere tablespoon and it still does nothing but screw up your food.

I feel like this is gimmicky in every sense of the word, and preys upon the self-sufficiency of harried consumers. It tastes fake, it's basically useless, and it markets itself as an upscale alternative to many, many other sufficient sauce boosters. This product practically fosters a dependency on packaged products. It's not the mommy bloggers' faults that they're busy, but it is their faults if they can't learn basic cooking skills or memorize the digits to their favorite Chinese joint. For $3.69, you could buy some cream cheese or make a whole mess of bechamel, both of which would provide the desired effect without the extraneous additions. Leave the Cooking Creme behind and order a pizza for your progeny.

SPICY WEEK PART 2: Regular Hot Sauces

All right. All is back to normal and the photos are here! So without further ado, let me share with you the results of a drunken evening with Swagger, 40 McNuggets, and an asston of hot sauces. Damn, son.We judged the hot sauces out of ten, with points for these categories:
Heat (Out of three. The heat had to be lingering with a good burn, but not painful)
Flavor (Out of three. Savory, peppery, vinegary, with a good balance.)
Appearance (Out of three. Visually appealing? Appetizing? Something you'd serve to guests?)
Label (Out of one. Is it clip-art or Cezanne?)The first sauce tried was the Suck Creek wing sauce. I especially liked it because of its name, but the clip-art minimalist logo, and funky chicken legs sticking out from the name were kind of cheesy. This was a visually appealing sauce, but had lots of vinegar. Possibly a little too much, because that was really all we tasted. It had a slight burn, but didn't really linger.
Heat- 2
Flavor- 1
Appearance- 3
Label- 0
OVERALL- 6The next sauce was a Caribbean hot sauce, Goldson's MoreFire. I love fruit and heat so I was expecting a nice mango or papaya flavor in this. It was difficult for Swagger to get this open because it was sealed with a crappy sticker, and combined with the ever-persistent "drunk hands," we quickly got irritated. The packaging was strange and looked like someone had gone overboard with Photoshop. And after all that work, it wasn't worth the hassle. It smelled strange, and the main ingredient wasn't even pepper. It was tomato. It smelled like barbecue and was overly chunky with a weird spice that faded quickly away.
Heat- 0
Flavor- 1
Appearance- 0
Label- 1
OVERALL- 2After that, we had a sauce that I'd had kicking around for a while, the Big Papi Double Hitter. Now, I don't know about you, but when I see a label advertising "Big Papi's sauce," a man whose lips are dangerously close to a smoking, phallic object, and flaming objects all around, I think of one thing. Luckily, Swagger knows a thing or two about baseball and informed me that this was actually the fabulous David Ortiz. And the sauce wasn't bad. The packaging may have been a little suggestive, but it had a nice blend of peppers and a decent heat with a clean, wasabi-like burn. It was a little salty, but carried a good smoky flavor, too.
Heat- 2
Flavor- 2
Appearance- 1
Label- 1
OVERALL- 6This hot sauce looked a little like the Suck Creek sauce, but with a thicker texture. It was a Southern hot sauce, so I expected a lot from this company. But Lillie's of Charleston spent more time making sure their labels were Gullah-approved than priming their hot sauces, because this was too sweet with a very slight burn suspected to be from the vinegar that clouded its flavor than peppers.
Heat- 0
Flavor- 1
Appearance- 1
Label- 0
OVERALL- 2After that, we had a sauce by Heartbreaking Dawn's. They sent over a few unique product that spanned other categories as well, but this classic "gold" sauce made me think of mustard and heat- two of my favorite things. The packaging was funky, but I didn't really understand what the tiki-like creature on the bottle was. It smelled promising, and wasn't too sweet, but had an overpowering vinegar aftertaste. It was still pretty tasty with a lingering burn.
Heat- 2
Flavor- 2
Appearance- 1
Label- 1
Overall- 7
Dr. Gonzo's Uncommon Condiments was a company I'd been chatting with for a while, and their products seemed diverse and interesting, with archaic names that reminded me of an apothecary. The packaging and labeling was clean-cut and monochromatic in an Inception, hipster-like fashion. This particular sauce, the Buffalo Balm, was very watery, but had an exceptionally tasty lime and jalapeno flavor and a really good, lingering prickle. There was no aftertaste, but there was one of the best afterburns of any of the sauces we'd had so far. This was seriously good stuff.
Heat- 3
Flavor- 3
Appearance- 1
Label- 2
Overall- 9The next sauce was weird in all senses of the word. For starters, Trini Mike's had a creepy anthropomorphic pepper character, and that guy was jacked. So we had this jacked pepper character on a beach, with his sexy pepper wife and adorable pepper infant grilling peppers on the beach, and then the pepper sauce in the bottle. These characters not only condoned cannibalism; they actively participated in it themselves! Who was the pepper in the bottle? A cousin? An ex-lover of Mrs. Pep? When we opened the bottle, the sauce had separated and was thick and gooey on top. This sauce was like napalm. It was painfully hot with no flavor and took about ten minutes for me to get the burn to recede, aided by about a half gallon of milk. I didn't enjoy this at all and thought it was disgusting.
Heat- 0
Flavor- 0
Appearance- 0
Label- 0
OVERALL- 0
The next sauce was a little misleading. I had been under the impression that this was a unique, fruit-based hot sauce, but it was really more of a fruit spread. It was unique, a sunny peach-tomato "hot sauce" with a really distinctly organic flavor, but it wasn't hot at all. Strangely enough, this contained habanero peppers, but we didn't taste them at all.
Heat- 0
Flavor- 1
Appearance- 2
Label- 0
OVERALL- 3We came up with another wing sauce after that one. It lived up to its name- Saucy Mama. It was a bright, bold red with a succinct label and it glistened on our nugget. This really was the perfect wing sauce- even going as far as to rival Frank's! It was a buttery, tangy wing sauce with a freakishly smooth texture. Really, really smooth, and it even had a decent heat to boot, perfectly balanced between pepper and vinegar. This was a wonderful sauce and Keepitcoming and I even used it in a sandwich for the Puppy Bowl.
Heat- 3
Flavor- 2
Appearance- 2
Label- 1
OVERALL- 8We then came onto the Crooked Condiments hot sauce. It said it was a jalapeno hot sauce, but was mysteriously brown and chunky, with a sour scent wafting from the bottle. It had a very distinct smell, like soy sauce and raw onions. And it was not what we were expecting- there was nothing to distinguish that it was at all jalapeno. It tasted more like a spicy tamarind sauce, with a quick burn and a milky, sour aftertaste.
Heat- 1
Flavor- 0
Appearance- 0
Label- 0
OVERALL- 1Ten sauces in and we were pretty tired and pretty wasted. It was already 1 in the morning and we'd ingested more nuggets than any man ought to. But still, we persevered. The next sauce was from the aptly named sauce line, Pain is Good. And indeed, it is, with a sauce like this. The sauce in question was a jalapeno harissa, a familiar spice flirting with the exotic. This, I liked. The bottle and labeling gave a mixed breed stereotype- maybe your hippie cousin's grungy girlfriend from Texas. She has dreadlocks. With its lunch bag label and screaming severed heads, along with a flask-shaped bottle, it was pretty snappy and a little sexy. Immediately after opening the bottle, a nice, smoky scent emanated out. It was a really flavorful, smoky sauce, and it wasn't too spicy, but packed enough heat to make us draw in our breaths. You can really taste the roasting of the peppers and spices in this.
Heat- 1
Flavor- 3
Appearance- 2
Label- 1
OVERALL- 7After that was a South African sauce, Nando's Hot Peri-Peri sauce. This was another bright, coral-colored sauce with a kick to its flavor- surprisingly, not a spicy kick. The real surprise in this was a bright, fresh burst of lemon about midway the bite. For a sauce with vinegar as the main ingredient, it sure wasn't as acidic as I'd imagined it to be.
Heat- 2
Flavor- 3
Appearance- 1
Label- 0
OVERALL- 6The last hot sauce of the night (thankfully) was Red Hot Robin's chipotle mango hot sauce. This was a drippy, almost syrupy in consistency, sauce that was a little heavy handed on the chipotle. The smokiness was almost too cloying for me, but it had a good burn to cut it and a sweet flavor, despite lacking a distinct mango taste. Swagger and I both liked the Ed Hardyesque packaging.
Heat- 3
Flavor- 1
Appearance- 1
Label- 1
OVERALL- 6

TOP THREE
1. Dr. Gonzo's Buffalo Balm (9)
2. Saucy Mama's Wing Sauce (8)
3. Pain is Good Jalapeno Harissa Sauce (8)

Stay tuned for tomorrow's spicy post...Swagger reviews death sauces!