Hallowings with Howlin' Hollar Pumpkin Hot Sauce

It’s Swagger season- October time in New England and it’s all about the pumpkins. There’s pumpkin lattes, pumpkin pie, and just about pumpkin everything. As the designated spicy foods reviewer of this blog, I was assigned to have a taste of this hot sauce containing pumpkin. From my experience, the best way to test the taste and integrity of a hot sauce is to put it on one of the most awesome foods ever, WINGS!In an opportunity to incorporate some fancy word play with one of my favourite holidays, I’ve decided to make “Hallow-wings” using this pumpkin hot sauce. When opening the bottle, I could smell that this sauce was not a normal hot sauce. Instead of the regular pungent vinegar smell of a Tabasco sauce, or Frank’s Red Hot, it had a rather strange sweet smell. It would have been rather difficult to pinpoint that the smell was pumpkin if the bottle was not labeled as so.When combined with the heat of the freshly fried wings, the sweet smell of the sauce was even stronger than the smell from the bottle. The taste of the sauce was quite sweet with a slight heat to it. There was not as much as an after burn rather than a nice sweet after taste. The sweet taste was actually very much like the taste of pumpkin, it was nice offset to the heat and acidity of the sauce. The taste of the sauce slightly conflicted with the taste of the flavour of the wings.

The sauce did adhere to the wings very well. It was able to coat every nook and cranny on each one of the wings, but personally I would not recommend it for use with wings, the flavour of the meat would clash with the subtle taste of the pumpkin too much and just cause the sauce to taste like a sticky hot mess.This sauce would be very good with a pumpkin based food such as pumpkin fritters or something similar. Overall it was an interesting sauce; it smells kind of funky but tastes like how it’s advertised on the bottle. It’s not extremely hot and doesn’t leave an after burn. Its uses are rather limited due to the exotic nature of this sauce and it wouldn’t go well with foods that are not pumpkin based. Happy Halloween!