En Fuego.

David Ortiz is hawking hot sauce. And I, being the highly suggestible type, decided that I needed to have some. So I popped into Stop and Shop and picked up a bottle of the original, a.k.a. mild. Plus, not all that long ago, I went to a little hole-in-the-wall Dominican restaurant and had a very tasty meal of skirt steak and onions (simply prepared but quite good) and so buying the hot sauce seemed like a good idea.

According to the packaging, the sauce is no ordinary sauce. It is, instead, a lifestyle sauce. Cool. I'm not entirely sure what that means but if eating it will make my lifestyle more similar to that of David Ortiz, then I'm all for it. Lots of money, adored by millions, well-respected by your peers, and you get to go to 162 baseball games a year? Bring it on.

The first ingredient listed is habanero pepper. Crap. For a gal who really doesn't do well with jalapeno *tilde implied* pepper and won't eat Thai food beyond satay (and wouldn't dream of touching the sauce) this might not be the best experiment. But I can take courage from the fact that the rest of the ingredients seem somewhat harmless: cayenne pepper (I've got lots of that around the house), vinegar (I once downed a shot of vinegar on a dare, made me sick but I did it), lime (tasty), carrot (seems like an odd ingredient but I've got nothing against carrots), garlic (raw garlic isn't a favorite but it's not terrible), salt, cilantro (fresh cilantro is tasty, dried tastes of air), sugar (I've always had a sweet tooth), various other spices, and vitamin C.

It was decided that my taste test needed to be as scientific as possible (read: I needed to screw up my courage) so I started by sniffing it. Unsurprisingly, it smelled of pepper with a faint hint of vinegar and maybe lime. It's got an orange-colored base, with little red flecks in it. There are seeds and bits of cilantro in the jar but they didn't come out in the first little bit I poured out. The vinegar cut the capsaicin enough that it didn't burn the finger that I dipped into it. It's got a thicker viscosity than Tabasco or Frank's, maybe a byproduct of the carrot. And since there was no way to make a report on the noise the sauce made, the only thing left was to taste it.

To be honest, it wasn't too bad. After the initial burst of heat, it died off pretty quickly. The strongest flavor after the heat was lime, followed faintly by garlic. In the name of scientific inquiry, I actually went back for a second taste. The initial heat from a drop on the center of the tongue lasted thirteen seconds. After fifty-two seconds the burn had almost faded completely but it wasn't until three minutes and fourteen seconds that the oil from the pepper dissipated enough for me to not notice it. In conclusion, if you like spicy food, then you probably want to start with one of the more intense levels available. As for me, I don't know what I'm going to do with a nearly full jar of the stuff.