I tried Fireball Whisky Hot Sauce

I tried Fireball Whisky Hot Sauce. It was… different.

I fucking love hot sauce.

Unfortunately, that love is completely one-sided.

A few years back I realized that what I had been mistaking for hunger pangs was really GERD-induced acid reflux. After three hours without food, my stomach would start gurgling. I tried fasting one time, and after 12 hours I was belching up stomach acid. After my doctor finished milking me and my insurance with needless tests (blood work for a possible ulcer, seriously?), a gastroenterologist confirmed that I had GERD.

If you’re not familiar with GERD, it basically means that you’re not supposed to eat anything with flavor or fat. In fact, the printout I was given recommended eating platefuls of vegetables. I was also prescribed PPIs that did fuck all.

I’d rather kill myself than eat nothing but bland vegetables for the rest of my life, but I still try to eat somewhat responsibly so I don’t feel like shit all day, so I cut back on some of the stuff that triggers acid reflux. One of the things I had to cut back on was hot sauce. I went from using Cholula and El Yucateco on everything daily to using Steve and Ed’s Garlic Buffalo Wing Sauce on my eggs every other day.

I’m not even supposed to be eating hot sauce at all, but sometimes you’ve just gotta ignore the doctor’s orders and prescribe yourself some enjoyment in life.

During a trip through the hot sauce aisle at ShopRite, this caught my eye:

Fireball Whisky Hot Sauce.

At first glance this might seem like a good idea. Whiskey and hot sauce can go together, and Fireball’s whole marketing gimmick is the heat. A hot sauce based on Fireball Whisky sounds like a no-brainer, right?

The problem here is, Fireball’s “heat” comes from cinnamon. And that’s why I didn’t find Fireball Whisky Hot Sauce to be very good. Most of the stuff that hot sauce usually goes on doesn’t pair well with cinnamon. The only meat I can think of that works with cinnamon is pork, and even then that requires the cinnamon flavor to be subtle. Fireball’s cinnamon flavor is too overpowering.

I’ll give some credit here, Fireball Whisky Hot Sauce definitely tastes like Fireball Whisky with a hint of pepper. The people who made this definitely captured the flavor of the liqueur. As I said though, Fireball’s flavor doesn’t really pair well with things that I use hot sauce on. Fireball Whisky is basically liquid Big Red chewing gum. Think of how many things you typically put cinnamon on. Would you put hot sauce on any of them? Probably not.

In any case, I decided to give it a try, just in case I was wrong. First I tried it on my eggs:

As predicted, cinnamon-flavored hot sauce on eggs mixed with ground beef, avocado, spinach, and cheese wasn’t very good.

Next, I tried it on my dinner, rice with mixed vegetables and ground turkey:

While it was slightly better than the eggs, it still wasn’t very good, and didn’t do anything to enhance the flavor of what I was eating.

I later tried it on a chicken wrap (I forgot to take a picture of this). Same thing, the cinnamon negatively affected the flavor.

I genuinely can’t think of anything that you’d want to put Fireball Whisky Hot Sauce on. The cinnamon flavor is just so overwhelming that it doesn’t pair well with anything. Maybe you could put it in a Bloody Mary?

I’ve tried quite a few novelty hot sauces, and Fireball Whisky Hot Sauce is the only one that really didn’t work on anything. I’d recommend skipping this hot sauce, unless you want your food to taste like spicy cinnamon shit.