Torchbearer Sauces – Headless Horseradish Sauce

This is another Torchbearer sauce I’d ordered multiple months ago but hadn’t had the opportunity to get to opening it until recently. I’ve enjoyed the vast majority of sauces I’ve tried from Torchbearer, I enjoy the flavor of horseradish, and I enjoy ghost peppers, so I’m not quite sure why it took me so long to get to this one, other than it was hidden behind several other bottles and I just hadn’t noticed it.

I’ve previously reviewed another horseradish produce, St. Elmo’s Steakhouse Shrimp Cocktail Sauce, and it had an amazing, sinus-clearing, absolutely wickedly hot amount of horseradish in it. I wasn’t expecting the same amount of punch from this one, after all St. Elmo’s ships that sauce cold and recommends refrigeration even before opening to preserve the freshness and heat of the horseradish, but a nice sinus clearing hit would have been welcome. Alas that was not to be, and the horseradish flavor of this sauce is fairly muted. You can absolutely still taste that it’s a horseradish sauce, but the overall horseradishy-ness of it is about akin to Arby’s Horsey Sauce in my opinion, though I will say the overall flavor of this sauce is much better.

Combining the bright nasal flavor of horseradish with the full smokier flavor of ghost peppers was a brilliant move with this sauce. Ghost peppers also work well with many of the same flavors that horseradish works with, including seafood and roasted meats, so there’s some excellent synergy there. This sauce also includes garlic and mustard which which are other great team players with both horseradish and ghost peppers, and really help round out the savory flavor notes.

Less successful in my opinion is the inclusion of chipotle peppers, which makes this sauce overly sweet to my taste. I looked at the label multiple times to see if this is one of their sauces with the orange juice base, but as it turns out it was not, it’s just those chipotles bringing their characteristic smoky sweetness to the party where I’d prefer they’d stay home.

Torchbearer of course is proud of making all-natural sauces, and this is no exception with no artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, or thickeners.

I found that although this sauce contains a lot of strong flavors it’s remarkably versatile. It’s great with steak as a steak sauce, it’s great with shrimp, it works beautifully on a burger or a sandwich, and even works well as a wing sauce. Anywhere you’d want to use mustard or horseradish this sauce seems to naturally fit. The heat level approachable but the heat builds and absolutely makes itself known.

While I wish it did have more of a horseradish kick, the more gentle horseradish approach may be preferable to a lot of people who don’t love their sinuses being lit afire. Even without that same impact as St. Elmo’s cocktail sauce, I can still heartily recommend this sauce because of its great flavor and versatility.

Ingredients: Horseradish, Ghost Chili Pepper, Garlic, Canola Oil, Water, Chipotle Peppers, Lemon Juice, Distilled White Vinegar, Dijon Mustard, Horseradish Powder, Salt, Chili Powder, Black Pepper

Heat Level: 4/10. The heat on this one build slowly as you eat more, not so much a powerful in your face punch, but a building fire that can sneak up on you