Bitter: ⭐⭐✰✰✰
Salty: ⭐⭐✰✰✰
Sour/Tangy: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Sweet: ⭐⭐⭐✰✰
Umami: ⭐⭐✰✰✰
Heat: ⭐⭐✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Quick Flavor Notes: Oil, garlic, onion, sesame, sweet
Recommended: No
Texture: Very thick, somewhat gritty, oily
Ingredients: Canola oil, garlic, water, distilled white vinegar, lime juice, sesame seed, poppy seed, sea salt, onion flakes, mustard seed, white wine, white sugar, turmeric, sesame oil, Scorpion pepper powder, citric acid
Secret Handshake Food Co is a hot sauce company that doesn’t seem to actually exist. Making only two sauces, this one plus one based on bloody mary flavors, and both sold only on Heatonist there’s no website or other online presence under the name. Looking up more details it appears this sauce was co-developed by Heatonist and Joe Santagato of Santagato Studios, a podcasting and YouTube troupe behind The Basement Yard which I can’t say I’ve heard of or seen before. Regardless, everything bagels are my favorite type of bagels so I was eager to see what an everything bagel hot sauce could offer.
This may be the first hot sauce I’ve tried with oil as the first ingredient. Continuing on from there with water vinegar and lime juice it’s clear they were going for a sauce with an emulsion which wasn’t entirely successful (more on that later). Next we have the everything bagel seasonings – sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sea salt, and onion flakes, and garlic. An interesting addition is the mustard seed, not typically seen in everything bagel seasoning. White wine is also unexpected but when combined with the mustard seed and vinegar perhaps they were going for a Dijon mustard flavor profile in the background. Bagels, outside of Montreal at least, aren’t supposed to be sweet (at least not in everything bagel trim) so I’m not sure why white sugar was added to this sauce. Sesame oil to amp up the sesame seed flavor makes an appearance and what comes next is both where this sauce get’s interesting and disappointing – scorpion pepper powder. That’s the entire pepper content of this sauce, just a tad of dried scorpion pepper powder. While creating a sauce based on everything bagel flavors seems creative to me it also seems incredibly lazy to just punt when it comes to the most important part of any hot sauce, the peppers. The mustard, onion, and garlic come through strong in the aroma of this sauce along with a sweet seedy background. Texturally this sauce is a cross between gritty and chunky with lots of seeds and is semi-emulsified. It’s quite clumpy in consistency, very thick and comes out in blobs with some of the canola oil separating even after shaking so a red oil slick precedes the sauce on occasion.
The canola oil flavor is dominant on the forefront of Secret Handshake Everything Bagel Hot Sauce. In that way the flavor is reminiscent of shelf-stable emulsified sauces such as ranch dressings or Guy Fieri’s Donkey Sauce. The little dribble of oil that comes out before the actual sauce is also not aesthetically pleasing or particularly appetizing. Thankfully that not-so-fresh oil flavor does fade and the onion, garlic, and mustard come through wiping it away. There is a period right after the oil flavor is washed away that this sauce has a nice savory fulfilling flavor with the sesame seeds and sesame oil sliding in in the background giving it a slight Asian taste that’s very appealing. Unfortunately there’s also a cloying sweetness from the added sugar which does something with the poppy seeds to remind me of a poppy seed muffin more than an everything bagel. This sauce would have been much better without that sweet element. There’s little to no actual pepper flavor either, expected since this sauce uses just powder and no real peppers. It’s similar to Hot ‘n Sauce Collards and Ghost in that way – cheapening out and using a bit of powder instead of real peppers just brings some heat without that real pepper flavor. I’m not sure if scorpion peppers would have necessarily been the best pick for going fresh here either as they do have a very strong flavor with big floral and astringent notes, perhaps not the best to pair with the other flavors in this sauce. The actual heat level is fairly minimal, just a step above basic, though with the scorpion powder it does build and linger longer than you’d expect from the initial presentation.
I found this sauce hard to pair. The bottle suggests pizza, chicken, and bagels. I found this a very poor sauce for pizza, the texture became very distracting as having this on pizza accentuated the grittiness. On an everything bagel with cream cheese putting this on top just highlighted how much this doesn’t actually taste like an everything bagel, though the combination wasn’t awful. I tried this on some pan-seared chicken breast and that was probably the best application though I still felt myself wishing I was using a different sauce instead. The Heatonist website suggests hot dogs, pierogis, and avocado toast. Not having avocados nor pierogis on hand I did try this on a hot dog and while the poppy seed content gave me almost a hint of a Chicago-style hot dog, and the onion, garlic, and mustard are of course perfect matches, that cloying sweetness in the background wasn’t a great match for a dog for me (though if you like ketchup or sweet relish on your hot dogs it may be up your alley).
Going in this is a sauce that I really wanted to like but this is going to be one of the few where I’m not going to even bother finishing the bottle. I teetered on the edge between giving this a conditional recommendation or a not recommended and I eventually landed on the latter. While this sauce isn’t inherently broken in the way that some I’ve tried are such as Buc-ee’s Hot Cheddar or Hell’s Kitchen Whiskey Habanero it has enough strikes against it from the old oil flavor up front to the unfortunate texture to the complete phoning-in of the pepper content that I can’t in good conscience say this is a bottle to seek out.
by MagnusAlbusPater
1 Comment
Bitter: ⭐⭐✰✰✰
Salty: ⭐⭐✰✰✰
Sour/Tangy: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Sweet: ⭐⭐⭐✰✰
Umami: ⭐⭐✰✰✰
Heat: ⭐⭐✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Quick Flavor Notes: Oil, garlic, onion, sesame, sweet
Recommended: No
Texture: Very thick, somewhat gritty, oily
Ingredients: Canola oil, garlic, water, distilled white vinegar, lime juice, sesame seed, poppy seed, sea salt, onion flakes, mustard seed, white wine, white sugar, turmeric, sesame oil, Scorpion pepper powder, citric acid
Secret Handshake Food Co is a hot sauce company that doesn’t seem to actually exist. Making only two sauces, this one plus one based on bloody mary flavors, and both sold only on Heatonist there’s no website or other online presence under the name. Looking up more details it appears this sauce was co-developed by Heatonist and Joe Santagato of Santagato Studios, a podcasting and YouTube troupe behind The Basement Yard which I can’t say I’ve heard of or seen before. Regardless, everything bagels are my favorite type of bagels so I was eager to see what an everything bagel hot sauce could offer.
This may be the first hot sauce I’ve tried with oil as the first ingredient. Continuing on from there with water vinegar and lime juice it’s clear they were going for a sauce with an emulsion which wasn’t entirely successful (more on that later). Next we have the everything bagel seasonings – sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sea salt, and onion flakes, and garlic. An interesting addition is the mustard seed, not typically seen in everything bagel seasoning. White wine is also unexpected but when combined with the mustard seed and vinegar perhaps they were going for a Dijon mustard flavor profile in the background. Bagels, outside of Montreal at least, aren’t supposed to be sweet (at least not in everything bagel trim) so I’m not sure why white sugar was added to this sauce. Sesame oil to amp up the sesame seed flavor makes an appearance and what comes next is both where this sauce get’s interesting and disappointing – scorpion pepper powder. That’s the entire pepper content of this sauce, just a tad of dried scorpion pepper powder. While creating a sauce based on everything bagel flavors seems creative to me it also seems incredibly lazy to just punt when it comes to the most important part of any hot sauce, the peppers. The mustard, onion, and garlic come through strong in the aroma of this sauce along with a sweet seedy background. Texturally this sauce is a cross between gritty and chunky with lots of seeds and is semi-emulsified. It’s quite clumpy in consistency, very thick and comes out in blobs with some of the canola oil separating even after shaking so a red oil slick precedes the sauce on occasion.
The canola oil flavor is dominant on the forefront of Secret Handshake Everything Bagel Hot Sauce. In that way the flavor is reminiscent of shelf-stable emulsified sauces such as ranch dressings or Guy Fieri’s Donkey Sauce. The little dribble of oil that comes out before the actual sauce is also not aesthetically pleasing or particularly appetizing. Thankfully that not-so-fresh oil flavor does fade and the onion, garlic, and mustard come through wiping it away. There is a period right after the oil flavor is washed away that this sauce has a nice savory fulfilling flavor with the sesame seeds and sesame oil sliding in in the background giving it a slight Asian taste that’s very appealing. Unfortunately there’s also a cloying sweetness from the added sugar which does something with the poppy seeds to remind me of a poppy seed muffin more than an everything bagel. This sauce would have been much better without that sweet element. There’s little to no actual pepper flavor either, expected since this sauce uses just powder and no real peppers. It’s similar to Hot ‘n Sauce Collards and Ghost in that way – cheapening out and using a bit of powder instead of real peppers just brings some heat without that real pepper flavor. I’m not sure if scorpion peppers would have necessarily been the best pick for going fresh here either as they do have a very strong flavor with big floral and astringent notes, perhaps not the best to pair with the other flavors in this sauce. The actual heat level is fairly minimal, just a step above basic, though with the scorpion powder it does build and linger longer than you’d expect from the initial presentation.
I found this sauce hard to pair. The bottle suggests pizza, chicken, and bagels. I found this a very poor sauce for pizza, the texture became very distracting as having this on pizza accentuated the grittiness. On an everything bagel with cream cheese putting this on top just highlighted how much this doesn’t actually taste like an everything bagel, though the combination wasn’t awful. I tried this on some pan-seared chicken breast and that was probably the best application though I still felt myself wishing I was using a different sauce instead. The Heatonist website suggests hot dogs, pierogis, and avocado toast. Not having avocados nor pierogis on hand I did try this on a hot dog and while the poppy seed content gave me almost a hint of a Chicago-style hot dog, and the onion, garlic, and mustard are of course perfect matches, that cloying sweetness in the background wasn’t a great match for a dog for me (though if you like ketchup or sweet relish on your hot dogs it may be up your alley).
Going in this is a sauce that I really wanted to like but this is going to be one of the few where I’m not going to even bother finishing the bottle. I teetered on the edge between giving this a conditional recommendation or a not recommended and I eventually landed on the latter. While this sauce isn’t inherently broken in the way that some I’ve tried are such as Buc-ee’s Hot Cheddar or Hell’s Kitchen Whiskey Habanero it has enough strikes against it from the old oil flavor up front to the unfortunate texture to the complete phoning-in of the pepper content that I can’t in good conscience say this is a bottle to seek out.