Joe’s Dos Veces Ahumado – Original Recipe

I usually tend to avoid overtly smoky sauces as I find so many of them go very overboard on the smoke content. When I saw Joe’s Dos Veces Ahumado hot sauce though, and read about how the owner and sauce maker felt similarly about how so many smoked sauces taste overbearing and artificial and wanted to make something different, I knew that I had to try it.

This is a mesquite smoked jalapeno sauce that uses a two-stage smoking process. When many people hear “smoked jalapeno” they automatically think it will be a chipotle sauce, and while chipotle peppers are a form of smoked jalapenos, not all smoked jalapenos are chipotles. In particular chipotle peppers are dried and go through a very specific smoking process. This sauce uses fresh green jalapenos smoked over mesquite wood.

Mesquite smoke has a very unique flavor. Sharper and less sweet than some other woods like hickory or cherry, it has a great earthiness and some bitter almost wildfire notes in the volatile compounds. It’s one of my personal favorites to add smoky flavor and usually my go-to when I want to throw in some wood-chunks to the charcoal when grilling a steak or some chicken.

Marrying the grassy fresh flavor of green jalapenos with mesquite smoke creates a bold initial flavor punch for this sauce, and one that couldn’t be further from the sweet flavor of chipotle peppers. This sauce does add a touch of sweetness from brown sugar and apple cider vinegar, but that sweetness is thankfully kept as a background note and doesn’t dominate the flavor profile. Garlic, salt, and pepper help counterbalance those little sweet notes. The addition of lime juice adds more freshness and helps cut the cloying nature that pure apple cider vinegar can sometimes have.

The texture of the sauce is free-flowing and not too thick. It reminds me of the texture of many Butterfly Bakery of Vermont sauces – just on the more liquidy side of medium thickness, and is about perfect for my preferences.

While this sauce is very mesquite-forward, the pepper flavor and supporting ingredient roles hold up to the smoke so that it doesn’t take over the sauce. The result is that I’ve found this sauce to be quite flexible. While it’s clear they’re going for a Mexican connection with the naming, and it is excellent with Mexican food, I’ve also found it one of the best sauces for pizza that I’ve tried, and also works great as a breakfast sauce.

This sauce also seems to basically be a one-man operation coming out of Washington state, a true craft small-batch sauce. I can easily recommend this, it’s unique, very tasty, and it’s always great to support the small sauce makers creating unique products.

Ingredients: smoked jalapeno peppers, distilled water, apple cider vinegar, lime juice, brown sugar, garlic, salt, pepper, xanthan gum.

Heat Level: 2/10. This is a mild sauce with a very gentle pepper nudge.