Now this is a very clever innovation in the world of hot sauces from Russell Williams of Grim Reaper Foods, these guys have come a long way since The Evil One and have certainly not been sitting back watching the world go by. Their product range is growing, as is their imagination.
Grim Reaper Foods - Jekyll or Hyde
As you can see from the picture, this sauce comes in two parts. The main bottle contains the sauce and the small dropper called Jekylls Potion? holds 10mls of Oleoresin, this enables you to decide how hot you want it to be, you have the control, either pour all the potion? into the main bottle for maximum pain or just a few drops. Of course you can pour some of the sauce out and add some to a small batch. The Oleoresin is measured at 500,000 Scoville Heat Units.
For those not familiar with Oleoresin, it is what is also know in the trade as extract?, enabling a sauce to be made much hotter without the need to add extra volume i.e more Chillies. It is basically a very concentrated residue from the capsaicin in a Chilli, which can be made on a small scale at home. Russell in fact made his own Oleoresin for his initial product, The Evil One which won an Award at Fiery foods Brighton in 2010.
Russell has written a guide on how to make your own and it is available on this site, I have made my own using this guide and I would recommend any Chillihead do it at least once, especially as you don’t need any fancy equipment. But it is far too labour intensive and expensive to make on a large scale at home.
Back to the sauce, I love the shape of the bottle, which gives the desired look of an old medicine bottle which would be guzzled by Dr Hyde. I do however think that the label design needs some more work as it doesn’t seem to have the same polish as their other products, especially the fabulous packaging on their Chocolate range. It’s very wordy and a little mixed up, the wording on the front isn’t very clear. I don’t know whether this has already been addressed since this review bottle was issued but maybe worth thinking about.
So onto the look of the sauce, without pouring it I cannot tell as the bottle is brown glass, this just adds to the mystery, but I can see that it’s fairly runny.
Once open I can smell the Chipotle Chillies and the sweetness of the Golden Syrup. ?Pouring the sauce on to a spoon, the sauce is a great orange colour and reminds me instantly in appearance to the base sauce of a takeaway curry. I dip my finger in and soon realise it has the same staining properties as a good curry! licking my fingers leaves my finger looking like badly applied fake tan!
The bottle says it’s an insanely hot sauce, and it is pretty hot in its pure form before the addition of the Oleoresin. There are a lot of different flavours going on at once and it’s hard to identify individual components. That said, it isn’t an unpleasant combination.
So now I need to mix some of the Jekyll Potion? to the sauce. The label on the dropper says Do not ingest in pure form? so obviously that’s the first thing I try! .The Oleoresin is clear with a yellow tinge and smells quite sweet, one drop on the tongue and it’s clear why it has the warning, it’s a different type of burn to eating a fresh chilli pod, although this is only 500,000 SHU’s, the way it affects the pain receptors is different and feels at least 1m SHU’s!
Ingredients: Red Capsicum, White Wine Vinegar, Water, Chipotle Peppers, Golden Syrup, Red Onion, Garlic, Sea Salt, Olive Oil, Citric Acid, and 10mls of Oleoresin extract.
Obviously how much you add to the sauce is up to you, that is the beauty of this product, you control the burn. Once added to the sauce I think it actually improves the taste along with the heat, but that may just be the burn taking over!
I do think it is one of those sauces that needs to be added to cooking, like the bottle says, on ribs or on meat, or indeed in a chilli, I don’t think it would suit eating with cheese like other sauces.
So overall, it’s a really good sauce and a very clever idea, the 150ml sauce is available from thedevilsgarden.co.uk, chillipepperpete.co.uk and hot-headz.com for around the £8 mark.
| Flavour |   (7/10) |
| Heat | Heat-As hot as you want to make it! |
| Packaging | (5/10) |
| Value | (7/10) |
| Overall | (8/10) |
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