Ruben’s Hot Sauce is the concoction of Ruben Ramirez, who is also the proprietor of Baltimore’s Ruben’s Mexican Food. It landed in my view thanks to Facebook’s frightfully accurate advertising algorithms, and I got curious about it.
It’s easy to tell quickly that Ruben’s Hot Sauce is a bit of an outlier. It’s kind of a rusty orange, which is maybe the third-most common hot sauce color—but it’s creamy and opaque, almost like salad dressing. It’s thick like dressing, too. I’m intrigued. What do we have here?
Ingredients: Double filtered water, vinegar, corn oil, chile de arbol, salt, cayenne, fresh garlic, granulated garlic, granulated onion, and natural gum.
Hmm. It looks like an outlier because it is an outlier. We’ve got mostly normal-sounding hot sauce stuff here, but corn oil in the third slot is clearly what’s responsible for its creaminess, as well as it being a bit up the ramp from more typical hot sauces on fat and calories. We don’t often see chile de arbol peppers on ingredient lists, either. That’s a Mexican pepper about as hot as serrano or cayenne.
I tried it first (essentially) straight, with a goodly dollop on one of Bark & Barrel BBQ‘s excellent house chips.
Wow. This isn’t extremely hot, but all of the heat hits up front, and it’s a bit startling. The peppers’ flavors come to the front riding a vinegar bite, and the onion and garlic are mainly in the finish. (Still hot enough to displease you if you think Tabasco is hot. Non-chileheads, be warned.)
I also tried it in a chicken quesadilla (the sauce is made for Mexican food, yes?). The chicken was only lightly marinated, so this was the most significant flavor in the quesadilla. No issues with it carrying the dish. It’s not a complex cocktail, but it’s consistently satisfying.
This is a relatively simple-tasting sauce, but the flavor is quite good, and it’s probably not going to remind you of anything else. (I appreciate novelty in hot sauces, because it’s tough for me to find anymore.) I expect this simpleness means this sauce is easy to apply to nearly any cuisine, without generating any odd gustatory cross-talk.
If you want to try it, you can get a 2-oz. sample bottle shipped for $6.49. (Yes, this stretches the boundaries of “free” just a bit, but you’d be at nearly twice that plus shipping for a full-size bottle.) Points from me for flavor and broad applicability. Extra points for uniqueness. I may order a bit more of it.
8/10
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