Bells’ Peppers – Ghost #7

There are local sauces, and there are sauces so local that someone from the company just drops your order off at your front door instead of bothering to go through the mail.

Bells’ Peppers is a relatively new hot sauce maker which happens to be located in a driving-distance from my home, and as soon as I learned that fact I had to order their entire lineup.

The brand was the result of owner James Bell’s love of hot sauce and constant nagging feeling that he could do it better. After much experimentation he has released his sauces to the world, with this particular sauce seemingly being their flagship product.

Ghost #7 is so named because it was the 7th attempt at Ghost Pepper sauce before they came to this recipe and felt it contained the magic. I can’t comment on what their previous attempts tasted like, but there is something special about this sauce.

Thin and smooth, there is more than a hint of heat on the nose as well as vinegar. There’s actual ghost pepper flavor in the sauce, with that pepper’s distinctive exotic slightly-smoky bite. That heat is kept in check however, so this is a sauce anyone could enjoy, the heat level maybe a smidge above medium.

The overall flavor actually reminds me somewhat of what a Tabasco Ghost Pepper sauce would taste like. It’s very polished, has excellent depth of pepper flavor, and there’s just enough of that vinegar in the taste to give it a nice acidity.

If you’re looking for a small-batch approachable ghost pepper sauce with a consistency that would also make it great as a cocktail mixer, this is a great place to look.

Ingredients: Purified Water, Ghost Peppers, Onion, Vinegar, Lemon Juice, Jalapeno Pepper, Carrot, Celery, Garlic, Sugar, Pepper, Salt, Xanthan Gum

Heat Level: 4/10. A respectable medium-hot hot sauce that enjoyable for chile-heads and newcomers alike.