I continue to review these hot sauces not just out of order, but now in a quite tardy fashion. Case in point this hot sauce based around everyone’s favorite subterranean kaiju (sorry Megalon): Baragon. What I’m reviewing is the “Carolina Reaper version” of the Baragon God of the Earth hot sauce. I stress the version because Jade City Foods seems to have gone down the path of reusing the names for their hot sauces for totally different flavors. In fact, the new Baragon hot sauce is a banana habanero sauce. In addition, rather than being a 10/10 on the heat level like this one, the new one is a 5/10.

A little confusing… but anyway, let’s dive in and review how the original Baragon hot sauce stacks up on the criteria of heat and flavor.

Heat

On Jade City Foods’ heat scale, this sauce ranks 10/10. As brought up before, though, the scale technically goes up to 11, but regardless this should be a very hot sauce. …sadly, it’s not. Now I’ve reviewed a couple of their 10 hot sauces, like Orga Absorbing Horror hot sauce and Megalon God of the Seatopians hot sauce, and this one was shockingly tame in contrast. Maybe the one I got was part of a bad batch?

To be fair, it’s not that the hot sauce was devoid of heat, but going from their own scale it felt more like a 5 or 6. Putting a little of the hot sauce on food, in my case butter lettuce tacos, did nothing. I had to really douse it before I got a sense of the heat, which still wasn’t overly strong but did finally bring the heat. This one is slightly watery, not as bad as some others though, so adding quite a bit to food isn’t all that hard… although be careful with what it does to the taste.

Taste

Both me and my wife gave this hot sauce the sniff test before trying, and it had a slight vinegar aroma to it. Sure enough, the taste did have a vinegar feel to it, not unlike other more store common hot sauces like Tabasco although that’s selling it short. First, despite my complaints on the heat, although for a bit of perspective my wife felt this one wasn’t hot at all, it does pack more of a punch and more flavor than Tabasco. One would probably hope so given this is a pricey hot sauce, but just wanted to put that out there.

Anyway, as noted above, to get an adequate heat out of it I had to douse food with it. Sadly, that caused the vinegar flavor to get a bit overpowering. Playing around, as I was sampling it with Mexican food, I decided to mix in some Verde salsa, pictured above. I tried putting a little hot sauce with the salsa, and the taste of the hot sauce was lost. It did raise the heat level marginally, though, so that was a win. Testing my luck, I put a ton of hot sauce on my next butter lettuce taco. The heat raised, but that pesky vinegar taste overpowered even the Verde salsa.

Ingredients for Baragon God of the Earth Hot Sauce

The ingredients are listed as follows: cayenne, smoked Carolina Reaper Pepper, smoked paprika, onion, garlic, vinegar and salt. Given the flavor profile, I was surprised vinegar wasn’t higher on the list.

As the other hot sauces from Jade City Foods, this one has 0 calories, along with 100mg of sodium and 1 gram of carbohydrates per teaspoon.

Final Thoughts

If you enjoy milder hot sauces with a bit of heat, Baragon God of the Earth hot sauce could be a hit. If you love vinegary hot sauces, I’m going to guess it will be quite a hit, in fact. The 10/10 ranking, again unless I happened to get a very mild one, was very misleading, though. If you don’t like heat all that much, though, and want to impress friends, this one could scratch that itch, especially as the bottle oversells it as “extremely hot, painful.”