One of the Best "Everyday" Sauces Around

I decided we should look at a sauce with a much more approachable heat level. That brings us to a sauce from Rising Smoke SauceWorks from my friend Mike Palmatier out of the great state of North Carolina where they specialize in hot sauce and barbeque sauce. Mike believes "you should smoke 'em if you got 'em". As you probably guessed based on the name of the company, all of his sauces start with smoked peppers. Today we're looking at the Scovie Award winning Smoldering Embers. They classify this as a medium sauce on their scale. The bottle lists it as simply having "blistering heat". 

Let's start with the ingredients: water, tomatoes, vinegar, onion, smoked habanero pepper, roasted red pepper, garlic, salt, spices, and cayenne pepper.

As you can see from the picture I've included, this sauce is bright red and you can see that it has texture and herbs/spices floating around in it. Its a thinner sauce but not watery by any stretch. The herbs and spices are even more apparent on the spoon. I don't know what other spices are in it but I'm guessing basil and/or oregano. I like that its not so pulverized that you can't see what's going on. I get the aroma of the tomatoes and the garlic more than anything. 

You can immediately taste that the peppers are smoked but the tomato and spices really balance it out. The habanero heat comes through pretty quickly. It has that typical stingy heat on your tongue that you always get from habaneros. I can only get a little bit of tang from the vinegar in the sauce's finish. I really feel the texture of the different spices or seasonings in the sauce as well. The heat dissipates pretty quickly which surprised me. That's not a good thing or bad thing though. Its just different. This heat will not set you on fire though, even if you're used to the more commercially available hot sauces from your local grocery store. It's a bit hotter than those sauces, but not unreasonably so.

To me this really tastes like a smoky pizza sauce. I've never had a sauce like that and it turns out I'm a big fan. I really think this sauce could go well on anything you would use a tomato based sauce on; its that versatile. I've used this on pizza, tacos, burritos, pasta, deli meat sandwiches, burgers, or even to dip my fries or onion rings. 

On my heat scale this sauce is about a 2 out of 10. If you're brand new to hot sauces its probably a 5 out of 10.

The flavor on this is 9 out of 10. You cannot go wrong with this sauce.

You can pick up this, or any of Mike's delicious sauces, at https://risingsmokesauce.com/

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