Gindo’s Spice of Life – Wasco Nursery & Garden Center Wasco Pepper Blend Hot Sauce

Gindo’s is one of the brands of sauces I’d been wanting to try for a while. They seem to have some very dedicated and vocal fans in the greater Chicago area where they’re based, and I appreciate that they have both a steady lineup of “always available” sauces as well as a rotating case of special releases and collaborations. I always love it when a hot sauce maker can have fun and exercise creativity with special limited-run projects.

Gindo’s was formed as a family business in 2011 when the owner lamented that many of the commercial sauces available used poor quality dried ingredients, focused too much on heat over flavor, or were marketed based on obscene or crass names and branding. Using fresh peppers from local farms and a variety of sea salts he sought out to do better and make a fresher more natural sauce that focused on flavor.

This sauce is one of those special collaboration sauces. It’s no longer available on the Gindo’s website (I actually purchased this box several months ago and have just now worked it into my rotation) but it is still available directly from the Wasco Nursery and Garden Center website. The Wasco Nursery and Garden Center is a Chicago area nursery and garden store that’s been in business for close to 100 years. This sauce features peppers hand picked from the Wasco farms.

Opening the bottle this sauce has a big fresh pepper aroma, with habanero leading the charge. It has a nice chunky natural consistency with plenty of pepper bits and a gorgeous bright red natural pepper color. According to the ingredients list Orange Carmen peppers are the first ingredient, which are a type of Italian sweet pepper with little to no capsaicin content, but it also includes an undisclosed “Wasco Pepper Blend”. That blend tastes as if it’s heavy on habanero but also has some super-hot content, possibly scorpion or reaper from the bright heat at the leading edge of this sauce.

Speaking of heat, this sauce took me off guard. The label states that it’s a medium-heat sauce, and typically when a sauce is advertised that way I find the heat level to be low to medium-low. This sauce is a legitimate chile-head medium to medium-high. It packs a punch, but it’s a big fresh punch. That freshness from the Wasco peppers absolutely comes through, and the sweetness of the carmens takes a bit of a back seat to the Wasco Pepper Blend and the more aggressive peppers within.

The sauce also features a number of different types of exotic salts as well as a mix of various herbs and spices. The pepper flavors dominate and I can’t pick out specific notes from those salts or pick out individual herbs in the overall flavor, other than some garlic, but they do combine to give the sauce a nice strong savory undertone that provides a great base for the bright and fruity heat and fresh pepper taste of the pepper blend. There is a citrusy backbone as well which mixes in with the natural fruity taste of the peppers in the blend and helps reinforce that fresh taste. Those citrus notes also help mollify the vinegar content, keeping this sauce from tasting vinegary yet still preserving the nice tang.

Despite having a number of different salts used in the sauce and sugar coming in rather high in the list of ingredients I didn’t find this sauce to be salty nor sweet in its presentation. The fresh Wasco peppers have such a strong flavor that they dominate the palate with this sauce, which isn’t a bad thing, I’m a fan of hot sauces that taste like peppers.

With a big fresh flavor hit, a nice savory backbone, and a solid amount of heat I found this sauce to be another one that’s easy to pair. It’s a great sauce for wings, where the brightness and freshness of the sauce is a great contrast to the fattiness of the chicken. On tacos it adds a fresh punch, and on fried fish it’s about perfect, again adding that fresh tang to offset the fried food heaviness. I found this worked well anywhere a sauce like original Tabasco would work well despite the two not tasting anything particularly alike, and this having far less vinegar tang. The brightness from the peppers combined with the citrus offer the same kind of cutting contrast you need to help balance out cream based, fried, or other fatty foods.

This is the first Gindo’s sauce I’ve tried but it certainly won’t be the last. I can easily recommend this one, especially if you love fresh tasting habanero-forward sauces.

Ingredients: Orange Carmen Pepper, Distilled Vinegar, Water, Wasco Pepper Blend, Himalayan Salt, Alderwood Smoked Salt, Organic Cane Sugar, Black Lava Salt, Alaea Salt, Garlic, Lemon Peel, Vegan Butter (plant based butter, garlic, onion, smoked paprika, rosemary, salt, pepper, sunflower oil, fennel seed, basil, bay, marjoram, oregano, thyme, mustard, cumin, cayenne pepper, celery seed, carrot, orange peel, savory, and sage), Ground Peppercorn, Xanthan Gum, Italian Seasoning, Chile de Arbol

Heat Level: 5/10. This one packs a surprising punch. There’s a brightness to the initial heat and it continues to build as you eat more of the sauce.