Gator Hammock – Suicide Gator

Bitter: ⭐⭐✰✰✰

Salty: ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰

Sour/Tangy: ⭐⭐⭐✰✰

Sweet: ⭐✰✰✰✰

Umami: ⭐⭐⭐✰✰

Heat: ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰✰✰✰✰✰

Quick Flavor Notes: Tangy, black pepper, garlic, floral, savory, salty

Texture: Medium thin and somewhat gritty

Recommended: Conditional

Ingredients: Louisiana Style Hot Sauce (Aged Cayenne Peppers, Distilled Vinegar, Salt, and Xanthan Gum), Distilled Vinegar, Water, Granulated Garlic, Salt, Crushed Red Pepper, Cayenne Pepper, Black Pepper, Onion Powder, Celery Seed, Chipotle, Scorpion, Jalapeno, Carolina Reaper, and other Peppers.

Felda, Florida is a little town in the middle of absolute nowhere. With a three-digit population and visitor activities limited to fishing and swamp tours, it seems an unlikely place for the home of a nationwide hot sauce brand. Buddy Taylor, the founder of Gator Hammock, started developing the recipe for the original Gator Hammock while selling barbecue out of his parents’ old combo gas station, convenience store, and beauty salon. After being encouraged to sell his sauce by his friends and softball teammates he eventually took the plunge and Gator Hammock was born in 1989 (maybe there’s an opportunity there for a Taylor Swift collaboration).

I’ve long been a fan of the original Gator Hammock Gator Sauce, I’ve found it’s tangy, garlicky, black-peppery flavor profile to be the perfect accompaniment for breakfast in particular. Suicide Gator takes the Gator Sauce formula and amps it up with a blend of superhot peppers including scorpion, Carolina Reaper, and more. Like a number of other sauces Gator Sauce, including Suicide Gator, uses a prepared Louisiana style hot sauce as its base and doctors it up further. With garlic, black pepper, cayenne pepper, crushed red pepper, celery seed, onion powder and more it sounds almost like it could be a great Bloody Mary mix (and spoiler: it works great there) but it’s also a pitch right down the middle of what a Cajun style hot sauce is – taking a Louisiana style base and doctoring it up with additional spices. You get big whiffs of that garlic and black pepper when you sniff the bottle, and hints of those superhot peppers sneak into the aroma as well. Texturally you can taste some of the dried and granulated spices, there’s a bit of a grittiness, and the sauce has a medium-thin consistency.

I love black pepper. I bought not one but two Unicorn Magnum pepper grinders so that I could try two different sources of peppercorns against one another to compare. Gator Hammock Suicide Gator satisfies my black pepper craving as few hot sauces do. In fact I can only think of Scorned Woman and Cluck-U Thermonuclear Sauce as having close to the save black pepper strength as Gator Hammock sauces from all that I’ve tried. In addition to that black pepper hit there’s a major garlic element in this sauce as well as plenty of tang from the Louisiana style base. The celery seed (a woefully underutilized spice) adds a depth of savory flavor. The superhot peppers don’t show up until the very end of the ingredients list but they still manage to impact the flavor and the heat. There’s some of that floral quality that scorpion peppers bring as well as maybe a hint of that reaper bitter-fruity-bright flavor. That superhot flavor is the rub with this sauce – I don’t think it merges particularly well with the base flavor of Gator Sauce, and while the extra heat is welcome, I find myself preferring the flavor of their original sauce that doesn’t include those peppers. As far as that heat goes there’s a medium amount up front but there is a prolonged moderate burn to Suicide Gator whereas original Gator Sauce essentially has none.

Since the original Gator Hammock Gator Sauce is one of my favorite hot sauces for breakfast I wanted to break out Suicide Gator for breakfast first. It pairs well with eggs and scrapple as expected, though that superhot pepper flavor and lingering burn may be a bit much for first thing in the morning. This does blend well with stronger flavors – I enjoyed it on tacos and with a jalapeno cheesesteak, it’s vinegary enough that it pairs well with richer foods. The best use case I found for Suicide Gator however was in drinks. With the black pepper, celery seed, cayenne, and garlic this is great to add some punch to a Bloody Mary or a Michelada.

As far as my recommendation for this sauce, that part gets a bit trickier. It’s a good sauce and I enjoyed it, but I realized the more of it I had, that I don’t enjoy it as much as the original Gator Hammock Gator Sauce. I believe it’s worth trying, especially if you love Gator Hammock sauces and really love the flavor of superhot peppers, but I can give up the extra heat for the better balance of flavor in the original. I’ll give this a conditional recommendation – if you like the idea of Gator Sauce with more heat and a superhot chile flavor sneaking in, give it a go. If you’ve never tried a Gator Hammock sauce before I’d go with the original first to get a good baseline.