Lola’s Fine Hot Sauce – Family Reserve

Bitter: ⭐✰✰✰✰

Salty: ⭐⭐✰✰✰

Sour/Tangy: ⭐⭐⭐✰✰

Sweet: ⭐⭐✰✰✰

Umami: ⭐⭐⭐✰✰

Heat: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐✰✰✰✰✰

Quick Flavor Notes: Fruity, rich, tangy

Texture: Medium and smooth

Recommended: Yes

Ingredients: Aged Carolina Reaper Peppers, Lime Juice, Vinegar, Red Jalapenos, Habanero Peppers, Garlic, Salt, Canola Oil

Lola’s Fine Hot Sauce was founded in Des Moines, IA by Toi Shah using his mother’s recipes. His mother, Carmelita “Lola” Shah immigrated to Iowa from the Philippines and brought her pepper sauce recipes along with her and made them for family and friends. After getting positive reactions with those he shared her sauces with Toi decided it could be a business and Lola’s was born. I’ve previously tried another Lola’s sauce, their Trinidad Scorpion sauce, and was not impressed with the flavor or the heat, the former being plasticky and somehow artificial, and the latter being practically non-existent. However, I’d heard good things about Lola’s Family Reserve and wanting to give the brand another chance I decided to give this one a try.

As opposed to every other Lola’s sauce, all of which start with a jalapeno puree and only contain a miniscule amount of the named pepper on the front of the bottle, Family Reserve does things right and begins their recipe with aged Carolina Reaper peppers. According to the Lola’s website this sauce is barrel aged, which explains the aged Carolina Reapers being listed. In addition the reapers Lola’s Family Reserve also makes use of red jalapenos and habaneros to round out the flavor and compliments them with lime juice and garlic. This sauce also contains a bit of canola oil. I’m a fan of adding oil to hot sauces as it helps carry fat soluble flavors and can help the texture be richer as well. Family Reserve has a smooth medium texture and you can see that oil a bit when you pour it out into a spoon. The garlic comes through strong in the aroma along with peppers.

Based on my previous Lola’s experience I didn’t expect to love this sauce as much as I do. Not only is this orders of magnitude better than their Scorpion sauce, it’s surprisingly one of the best sauces I’ve tried this year. What I really love about it is how pure of a Carolina Reaper flavor there is. Oftentimes reapers can have a bitter astringent quality but there’s none of that here – it’s all beautiful bright Carolina Reaper fruit flavor. With a major pepper like that at the forefront the jalapenos and habaneros obviously get overshadowed but they’re in the background filling out the flavor and making it more robust. As big as the garlic aroma is it’s not super prominent in the flavor of Lola’s Family Reserve but it does add some savoriness. The lime juice blends with the vinegar to give it plenty of acidity without tasting vinegary. The barrel aging must be the secret weapon here because as fruity and fresh as this sauces tastes there’s also a deep umami richness just underneath. There is some immediate heat as expected from a reaper sauce though this doesn’t kick as hard as something like Torchbearer’s Garlic Reaper, I’d put is closer to Bravado’s Black Garlic Carolina Reaper in terms of heat. There’s a lingering but continually dissipating tail to the heat. This is hot, but certainly manageable.

I will note that this sauce on the Lola’s website now shows different ingredients. The “Limited Batch” labeling has disappeared and the ingredients are now listed as: Red Jalapeno Peppers, Water, Distilled Vinegar, Lime Juice from Concentrate, Garlic, Salt, Carolina Reaper Powder, Canola Oil, Orange Habanero Peppers. The sodium has also nearly doubled from 50mg per tsp to 95mg per tsp. Obviously this is a major crapification of the sauce in order to make it cheaper (and also likely to use a cheap copacker who doesn’t have the resources to barrel age the peppers). This is something Hot N Saucy did with their Collards and Ghost and it’s always sad to see a quality hot sauce be ruined by greed. The new label shows “Family Recipe Reserve” while the one I have shows “Limited Batch Family Reserve” so if you want to get the good one make sure you look for that labeling.

Being fruity and pepper forward I expected this sauce to be flexible and indeed it is. I loved it on sandwiches where it adds a lot of zing and wakes flavors up plus adds a fun amount of heat. There’s enough acidity that this works very well dripped into some pasta or into chicken pot pies – it cuts the richness and the fruit and heat really make them more complex and interesting. I even liked this in some reheated fried rice – the umami rich backbone this has makes it blend well with Asian food. It also works great on tacos. I didn’t find anywhere this wasn’t excellent, though I didn’t try it on ice cream.

I’m happy to give Lola’s Family Reserve my highest recommendation with the caveat, and this is a big one, that you get the version that I had that starts with aged Carolina Reapers and not the new cheapened version that they think they can sneak by using only reaper powder as if it’s remotely the same thing. This sauce is also all natural with no artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, or thickeners.