Ghost pepper sauce is extremely hot but can have a balanced flavor with sweet and sour notes, garlic, ginger, lime, or Worcestershire sauce. Some sauces may contain other peppers, which can affect the overall taste. Care should be taken to avoid sauces made solely for novelty purposes.
The ghost pepper is one of the hottest peppers grown for human consumption, although it also has a very floral, melon-like aroma that betrays the extreme amount of heat it contains. Any ghost chili sauce that uses peppers as the main ingredient is likely to be much, much hotter than other, more traditional sauces, although there are other factors that can assist in choosing the best sauce. One of the first distinctions is whether the sauce has been balanced against sweet and sour flavors, with the vinegar providing the acid and sugar often used for sweets. Next, some sauces use ingredients like garlic, ginger, lime, or Worcestershire sauce to enhance the flavor, though the amount can be overwhelming, especially when added in large quantities to offset the heat from the ghost peppers. Finally, not all ghost chili sauce is made from ghost peppers alone, and the inclusion of other important chilies could make the flavor too hot for any practical culinary purpose, or could create an undesirable mix of contrasting flavors.
When choosing the best ghost chili sauce, one factor to consider is whether the sauce is made as a novelty or as a balanced culinary flavoring. Ghost pepper, also called bhut jolokia pepper, is renowned for its heat, so some ghost pepper sauce might be made with the sole intention of providing a painfully hot flavor, with little taste other than heat. Sometimes these sauces can be recognized, but not always, by the use of extracts and other chemicals that carry the heat without adding flavor or mitigating the intensity in any way.
For a ghost chili sauce that has flavor, the base is most often vinegar but can also include water and other liquids. The balance between the amount of ghost pepper and the liquids can help create a sauce that has flavor instead of just heat. Some sauces will also include other ingredients that help add flavor, including garlic, tomatoes, ginger, black pepper, salt, and sometimes less common ingredients like lime, alcohol, cumin, and other spices. These help create and enhance the natural fruity, melon-like flavor that a ghost pepper releases when initially tasted.
One element of a ghost chili sauce that can dramatically change its overall character is the inclusion of different types of peppers in the blend. It is not necessarily uncommon to find that peppers such as habaneras, jalapenos or chipotles have been included, sometimes to enhance flavor. Care should be taken, however, if a ghost chili sauce contains a number of other peppers that are also considered quite hot, such as Scotch bonnet peppers or scorpion peppers. In these cases, if you’re not careful, the overall heat of the sauce and the disparate aromas of the peppers could result in a very hot but flat or strange tasting sauce.
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