Segen Sauce Feedback

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We have received a lot of feedback from people who have tried Segen Sauce and it’s been humbling and, truly, an honor to see people taking time out of their schedules to share their reactions, input, and suggestions with us. There is a few things we’re concerned about when we ask people what they think about Segen Sauce, but the things we pay special attention to slightly more than the rest is input about the level of heat, the flavor, and how it interacts with the flavor of whichever food they were having. These three are at the core of why this sauce was created in the first place and the answers let us know about its potential appeal to the hot sauce consumer market.

The consensus is that the sauce is definitely hot. There’s no lack of fire. It is hot for normal people, and those who like Carolina Reaper heat will find that it still stimulates the taste buds enough to make you feel it. The actual heat that one experiences depends on how much sauce one uses and how much food it is being mixed with. So the heat level aspect is good across the board.

As far as the flavor and how it interacts with the flavors of other foods, Segen is meant to be flavorful without being overpowering. If you’re eating an omelet it means you want to taste and enjoy its flavors from whatever ingredients you have in there. Segen Sauce wasn’t designed to go on your plate and add extra salty, smoky, garlicky, or any other flavor that masks your food’s own flavors. What we are finding is all tasters find that Segen Sauce won’t indeed overpower the food’s flavors. Some, however, want, and expect, the sauce to give them an extra flavor effect. Even though the numbers were few (less than 2 out of 58 tasters), our sample size was also small and that represented about 3.5%, which translates into a huge number if you consider the whole hot sauce market.

We looked at several options and changing the sauce itself wasn’t considered because it’s still overwhelmingly liked the way it is, but we chose to add other sauces that might use peppers with more overwhelming flavors. Segen Sauce Cae, which uses cayenne peppers and is less spicy but has a more distinct flavor, will be available in a matter of weeks. It, like the original Segen Sauce, won’t completely overpower your food’s flavors, however. We understand you can’t be everything to everyone- and we’re not trying to be- but it helps us plan for future sauces that would hit segments of the consumer market that are not reached by our current line of sauces. We really appreciate the reception Segen Sauce has gotten so far and look forward to any feedback you can give us that will help us bring sauces that you want and like.

Some of the feedback we’ve received:

“We loved the sauce!!!”

“Wow!!! That s**t is nuclear!”

“Congratulations on your delicious hot sauce. I just had some black eyed peas but they tasted so much better with your sauce. I think it’s a hit, I love it, and I totally would buy more.”

“It’s hot and it’s a hit here so far.”

Hot Sauce: Should You or Should You Not Refrigerate

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Should you, or should you not refrigerate your opened hot sauce. That is the modern age-old question in regards to hot sauce.

There are multiple factors to consider when deciding whether to refrigerate your opened container of hot sauce, such as weather (hot or cold), humidity, hot sauce ingredients (the more ingredients it has, the more likely you need to refrigerate it), how often you use it, how hot you want it to remain over the long term, etc.

Before we address those factors, you should know that there are two basic methods of making hot sauce: fermentation and acidification. Fermentation is when you let peppers sit in a liquid for a long time, let them ferment, then process, bottle the mixture. Acidification is when you add an acid, such as vinegar, to peppers and heat it to kill any bad stuff in the sauce that might kill you, like bacteria and the stuff they produce when they multiply (we don’t want to turn this into a biology or biochemistry lesson so we won’t name all these thing here but they do have a name and they are very, very dangerous…like kill-you-dead type of dangerous), then you bottle and seal.

Segen Sauce is of the second formulation. We take peppers, puree them, add in all the other ingredients including vinegar and lemon juice to bring the pH level down to a healthy level then heat the mixture to a high temperature, for a long time (much longer than we are required to because we are naturally overachievers), before bottling and sealing. A lot of the small batch, gourmet hot sauces are made in this way with a slight variation in ingredients and processing times based on the pH levels of the sauces.

Once you open the container, the ingredients begin interacting with the air and all the stuff it contains such as gasses, bacteria, viruses, and a bunch of other things. Your sauce then begins defending itself against any of these that might seek to establish residence in it and potentially make you sick. This is ultimately a losing fight but how long it lasts depends on whether the odds are really stacked against it or if they’re just stacked against it in a more or less normal way.

If you ever took chemistry in high school and you were paying attention, you know that heating something in a liquid excites its molecules and makes it dissolve faster. Same thing applies here. If it’s hot and humid, your sauce will succumb faster. If it’s colder, you’ll enjoy it longer.

If you have a lot of different ingredients in your sauce, you might find they spoil at a faster rate than peppers and acid and they bring this quality to the sauce and it can only contribute as a negative. Your sauce will spoil faster than it normally would. If their natural pH level is higher than 7.0, it will also affect the final pH of the hot sauce. The higher the pH, the higher the chance of needing refrigeration sooner.

This is also why many manufacturers resort to preservatives. They let your sauce last longer on the battlefield against these fiends.

The last two factors are closely-related so I will address them together. If you go through hot sauce pretty fast, then you don’t really need to worry about refrigeration. If this is you, then you don’t have to worry about it losing some of its heat. From my experimentations, a refrigerated sauce will retain a higher heat intensity than a non-refrigerated sauce even if both sauces are made at the same time and opened at the same time. You don’t have to worry about this if you go through your hot sauce pretty fast, as I said, but if it takes you two months or so, then you could benefit from refrigeration. I have to add that the difference won’t be much but it was noticeable for me.

So, should you or should you not refrigerate? You can decide based on your surroundings and preference. Segen Sauce can remain open and unrefrigerated for almost two years. Refrigeration will make it retain its heat level even though the heat drop-off won’t be noticeable for most people but let us know where you stand on this and what your experience has been refrigerating or not refrigerating your favorite hot sauces.

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