Karma Sauce – Lift Off

Bitter: 🟡🟡○○○

Salty: 🟡🟡○○○

Sour/Tangy:🟡🟡○○○

Sweet: 🟡🟡🟡🟡○

Umami: 🟡🟡○○○

Heat: 🟡🟡○○○○○○○○

Quick Flavor Notes: Sour, Savory, Sweet, Coconut

Recommended: Yes

Texture: Medium and mostly smooth

Ingredients: Green Chiles, Vinegar (Infused with Galangal, Lemongrass and Kaffir Lime Leaf), Lime Juice, Coconut Water, Coconut Sugar, Garlic, Salt, Toasted Onion, Green Chile Flake, Thai Basil, Culantro, Spices

Karma Sauce out of Rochester, NY is one of the hot sauce makers that I’ve grown to respect through the sauces that I’ve tried from them thus far. From their mild Bad Karma to their absolutely scorching Burn After Eating all of the sauces that I’ve tried from them have been well crafted with unique flavors. Lift Off is a new sauce released for season twenty-six of Hot Ones where it appeared in the number two position. I’ve generally been a fan of the special sauces released for Hot Ones especially as they’ve transitioned from taking sauces from off of the shelf from sauce makers to commissioning unique new sauces from them for new seasons, so I was excited to give this a try.

According to Karma the inspiration behind this sauce was a Thai green curry. I can love a good Thai green curry, but my initial reaction to that was that this sauce is a very unattractive brown color for being supposedly green curry based. The chiles uses are just listed as green chiles, which could be Thai chiles or something else. Instead of adding fibrous aromatics such as lemongrass, kaffir lime leaf, and galangal (a southeast Asian cousin of ginger) Karma instead infuses them into the vinegar. That’s a smart choice as I’ve had sauces which use them straight and they can lead to an unpleasant fibrous texture, though it also means that by just infusing the vinegar the flavors will be more muted. In addition to the infused vinegar more acidity comes in the form of lime juice (Uncle Roger would not approve). Both coconut water and coconut sugar add sweetness. Coconut sugar is also known as palm sugar and comes from the sap of the coconut palm, it’s a very common ingredient in Thailand and has a richer more complex flavor than white sugar. In terms of aromatics rounding things out there’s culantro, an herb similar to cilantro but with a more robust flavor that’s common in SE Asia and the Caribbean, as well as Thai Basil which has a unique anise-y flavor. Lift Off is medium in consistency and does have a sweet and Asian-aromatic aroma. It’s more smooth than chunky but isn’t blended into oblivion like some brands do.

Thai inspired sauces seem to be becoming more popular lately and I’ve tried a number of them from Torchbearer, Bottle Fed, Gindo’s, Seed Ranch, O’Malley’s Hot Sauce, and more plus a number of Thai snacks from the Asian grocery store and online. Just as with any cuisine however there’s a wide variety of flavor profiles in Thai food which leads to great variety in terms of Thai hot sauces. Karma’s Lift Off is most similar to Seed Ranch’s Hot Thai Green in terms of flavor profile and the two share a number of ingredients. Hot Thai Green is, well, greener (I’m not sure why Lift Off is this particular shade of brown given the ingredients) and spicier as well as more forward in the Thai aromatics. Like that Seed Ranch sauce however Lift Off comes across as much more of an ensemble act rather than having any particular ingredient stealing the show. There is a pronounced sourness in the sauce but it’s not the ultra-tangy vinegar-forward sourness that some sauces have. I believe it’s partially from the vinegar, lime juice, and kaffir lime leaves but also from the actual chiles uses as Thai chiles in particular have a certain sour flavor. Galangal has more of a peppery and medicinal flavor compared to ginger and there’s a background of that as well, though I don’t pick up a lot of the lemon grass. The coconut flavors do come through in Lift Off but aren’t as prominent as very coconut-forward sauces I’ve tried such as Blind Hot Sauce’s Coconut Reaper or The Spicy Shark’s Mako Snake. The biggest thing that does hold me back a bit from this sauce is that the culantro and Thai basil don’t have the fresh vibrancy that I’d want. Getting delicate herbs like that to taste fresh and vibrant is incredibly difficult in a shelf-stable sauce as those vibrant flavors usually don’t survive the cooking process required for shelf stability. As expected from a number two position on Hot Ones, the heat here is quite mild though there is a bit of a linger.

Karma suggests that this sauce goes well with anything from grilled fish to eggs to tacos on the bottle, and while I don’t expect any sauce company to print on their bottle that a sauce is very limited in applications, I think they’re overstating things a bit there. I did try this on tacos and felt that it was absolutely out of place there with the Asian flavors, but I could see this perhaps working well on Asian fusion tacos, that’s just not something I typically crave. I did try this with eggs as well and again, not a huge fan of that combination, the sweetness and lack of strong tang made this a poor fit for the type of hot sauce I enjoy with breakfast. What I did find successful with this sauce was with some grilled shrimp, where the sweetness and the Thai herbal notes really accentuated the sweet shrimp meat and the char from the grill. I also found this sauce to go great with grilled chicken for the same reasons. Since Lift Off has complex flavors in its own right I’d recommend pairing with foods that are simpler in flavor.

Lift Off by Karma Sauce gets a recommendation from me if not a particularly enthusiastic one. I waffled between giving this a conditional or a recommended but the sauce is well crafted and mostly does what it says (I do wish that the Thai Basil, Lemongrass, and Culantro came through more and that it was more fresh and vibrant) but I find this is the sauce from Karma that I’ve liked the least. I also feel that for a similar sauce Seed Ranch’s Hot Thai Green does a better job of what this sauce does and would be my recommendation for the one to get if you’re looking for a Thai green curry inspired sauce. Lift Off is however all natural with no artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, or thickeners.