Saucy Queen / Intensity Academy – Garlic Goodness

Bitter: 🟡○○○○

Salty: 🟡○○○○

Sour/Tangy:🟡🟡○○○

Sweet: 🟡🟡○○○

Umami: 🟡🟡○○○

Heat: 🟡🟡○○○○○○○○

Quick Flavor Notes: Garlic, vegetal, smoke

Recommended: Yes

Texture: Medium with natural texture

Ingredients: Garlic, red bell pepper, red wine vinegar, onion, habanero pepper, Thai peppers, kosher salt, black pepper, natural smoke flavor

This is a sauce that I picked up from the Pinellas Pepper Fest in Tampa, FL last year. I always love a good garlic hot sauce and this one caught my eye for actually having garlic as the first ingredient by volume, something that many garlic hot sauces somehow manage to not figure out. This is a sauce local to Tampa and I always love to find new local hot sauces when I go to an event. I was excited to open this up and bask in the glory of the garlic.

Something that struck me as I read the label and took the photos for this bottle was that the branding here is very poor. While the Garlic Goodness name is nice (although also shared with a sauce by Maritime Madness) and the label is attractive the actual name of who makes the sauce and where it buy it online is conspicuously absent from the bottle other than a little blurb about it being manufactured by Intensity Academy. The actual web store for Intensity Academy is at Saucyqueen.com though you’d never know it unless you googled it. It’s something I’ve seen from other small hot sauce companies and it’s such an easy thing to fix by actually promoting the name of your brand on the bottle and adding your website text to it somewhere. Onto the actual sauce ingredients as I mentioned above garlic is the first ingredient by volume and Saucy Queen states that they use 100 lbs of garlic per batch (though it doesn’t state how large a batch is). The heat comes from habaneros and Thai chiles, a blend you don’t often see together, but one that should be nice as habaneros bring some fruitiness and Thai chiles bring some of that sour funky heat. Red wine vinegar provides the acidity, another interesting choice but one I’m always a fan of. Black pepper and natural smoke flavor round things out. The natural smoke flavor is likely liquid smoke, which, although industrially produced is ostensibly a natural product as it’s made by burning hardwoods and condensing the resultant smoke into water. Obviously smoking the peppers themselves would be preferable to using liquid smoke however.

Saucy Queen Garlic Goodness does have a very strong garlic aroma with just a hint of smoke. The texture is pleasantly rustic and natural with some small bits of peppers and garlic evident in the sauce and a medium consistency. The first taste makes it obvious that they do not skimp on the garlic. Saucy Queen says it’s almost more of a garlic puree than a hot sauce and I have to agree with her, this is the most garlicky hot sauce I’ve ever tasted. It’s even more garlicky than my previous most-garlicky hotsauce Bell’s Peppers Alliumphobia. Saucy Queen says she roasts the garlic but the garlic flavor I get is a combination of that sweet roasted garlic flavor and the more aggressive peppery bite of raw garlic. I personally love that as I’m a big fan of brash raw garlic flavor. There is some fruity habanero flavor mixed with the more vegetal bell peppers and just the barest hint of that Thai chile sourness. The smoke doesn’t come in until towards the end and it isn’t overpowering in this sauce, it does add a nice accent. The biggest thing I think this sauce needs is a bit more salt. At 14mg per serving this is one of the lowest sodium hot sauces on the market and that lack is apparent when its put on foods lacking a lot of salt themselves. Heat level is low, one of the milder habanero sauces that I’ve tasted.

I’ve been craving seafood lately so I first tried this on some shrimp nachos and shrimp fajitas from a local Mexican place. Garlic and seafood often go well together and that was the case here as well, with this sauce also being mild enough that it didn’t cover up the natural flavor of the shrimp. I was also very happy to find out my favorite Delaware-based sub shop Capriotti’s recently opened a location near me. This sauce is very solid on subs, both turkey and pastrami, though it could do with more acidity when it comes to really fatty subs like cheesesteaks. Finally I tried this out on pizza and it’s amazing there. Garlic and pizza are always a match made in heaven (and seriously, more pizza places need to offer fresh garlic as a topping) and this sauce seems custom made for it.

Saucy Queen Garlic Goodness gets my recommendation, especially if you like heavily garlic-forward hot sauces. If you’ve had other garlic hot sauces and thought “OK, I can sort of taste like there’s a little garlic here” and wanted more, this will deliver and then some. This sauce is also all natural with no artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, or thickeners.