Bravado Spice Co – Arbol Chili & Garlic Hot Sauce

Bravado Spice Co is a craft hot sauce company out of Texas, founded in 2012 that’s grown to have a national presence with their products available in many specialty stores and some grocery store chains. One interesting tidbit is that apparently one of the company founders was on Masterchef Season 4. They have a wide variety of sauces from mild fruit based to scorching sauces made with the hottest of super hot peppers. This particular sauce is in their medium range and is an evolution of their now-discontinued mainline Crimson hot sauce, which from what I can tell from finding old labels switched the quantities of Arbols and Red Jalapenos from what’s found in this sauce.

Bravado has an attractive design language for their labels, and I appreciate that their sauces are named after the peppers used. In the case of this sauce it’s both informative and misleading in some ways – the main pepper by volume isn’t the Chile de Arbol, but rather red jalapenos, but the arbols do dominate the flavor profile. Since I enjoy both red jalapenos and arbols I went in with high hopes.

With Chile de Arbol, red jalapeno, garlic, and cumin this sauce has a Mexican flavor profile. The aroma reminds me of Mexican taqueria salsas, again likely the arbols at play, and the sauce has a medium smooth consistency. The flavor is very earthy, the cumin and arbols combining to bring a deep rich flavor, and there is a little bit of sweetness from the red jalapenos. There are garlic notes present, but I didn’t find this sauce to have a powerful garlic flavor, more of a background note to the peppers and cumin. Interestingly, despite distilled vinegar being the first ingredient by volume in this sauce, it doesn’t have a very vinegar-forward taste. The overall flavor profile is much more earthy and savory than it is tangy or piquant. It came across as saltier than average to me, but checking the label the salt content isn’t high, so it could be some of the other flavors combining and that overall earthy flavor giving the impression of saltiness.

With this being a Mexican style sauce I went in that direction first for testing it out. It does go well with tacos and fajitas, and subbing it in for my stand-by Valentina Black on some nachos worked well also, though I did miss the Valentina tanginess. Going beyond Mexican food this does work well on wings and drizzled on fries. One of the unexpectedly best applications was spicing up some Mexican ceviche de camarones, the high acid content in the dish combined with the more earthiness of the sauce was a great flavor combination.

While I’m sure it’s a concession to larger production volume needed for widespread retail distribution, I do wish the sauce used fresh peppers, garlic, and lime juice instead of pre-prepared purees and concentrates.

I can recommend this sauce as a solid Mexican style red sauce, especially for those who don’t like an overly vinegar-forward flavor.

Ingredients: Distilled Vinegar, Jalapeno Pepper Puree (Jalapeno Peppers, salt, and acetic acid), Chile de Arbol Peppers, Garlic (Garlic, Water), Lime Juice from concentrate, Cumin, Black Pepper

Heat Level: 2/10. This is rather low in heat, maybe a step above Frank’s and Crystal