During the summer bushfires we lost power to our home for several days and as such lost everything in our fridges – including my beautiful range of hot sauces. Sniff… dark days indeed.
It’s over half a year later and I’m still slowly building a small collection back up. As such, when I saw some for sale right in the little town we live near, I couldn’t resist grabbing a bottle.
So let’s have a look at the latest offering from Bunsters, subtly titled – SHIT THE BED Aussie Hot Sauce.
The Flavour
Now with a name like Shit the Bed you probably aren’t expecting a top of the range hot sauce, full of subtle flavours that complement the heat. And you’d be right! Trying a bit on its own is like getting stung on the tongue by a wasp, a short sharp unpleasant sting to the tastebuds.
Of course, hot sauces aren’t meant to be eaten on their own, just as one is not supposed to drink from a bottle of tomato sauce. They are a condiment to be added to other foods. So I tried this sauce out on a homemade double-beef burger.
I will say that as a supporting flavour this hot sauce does come into its own. The sauce significantly added to the taste of the burger, and whilst still rough around the edges it was fairly pleasant on the whole. The label on the bottle said the hot sauce goes great with pizza and eggs so I added an extra dollop to the fried egg on my burger for good measure.
Bring the Heat… please!
This hot sauce may have an initial bite to it, but it is severely lacking in the heat department, despite Warning: This sauce is extremely hot being on the back label. Whoever wrote on the front label that the heat is 12/10 was either taking liberties with the truth or sorely needs to revisit their high school maths. Even eating this hot sauce straight wont make you yearn for a cup of water or milk and within a minute the heat has fully receded from your mouth. At a measly 35,000 Scoville’s it’s not even a tenth as strong as Mad Dog 357 (which has a level of 357,000 Scoville) and does not deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as God Slayer Fucking Hot Sauce which comes in at a whopping 6.4 million! Yep, if you are after a heat challenge from your hot sauce I’d look elsewhere.
So… did I soil my sheets?
The implied claim with the name of this product is that the hot sauce is so lethal it will make you shit the bed. Indeed with some of the heat challenges I’ve done such as attempting Australia’s Hottest Hamburger, I’ve had to get up at 2am in extreme gastric distress and sit on the toilet for an hour or two. Surprisingly, despite the relative lack of heat, around 10pm that night I did have to go sit on the toilet for a while with my stomach churning. However instead of the usual liquid lava boiling from my bowels it felt like I had eaten a dodgy curry or something. And if this had all taken place after I had nodded off, the attack was not that acute that I think I would have dropped a brown one in the bed rather than made it to the lavvy. Nope, no ring of fire for this cowboy’s latest ride.
Is this hot sauce worth your time?
If you are a hot sauce connosuier like me then no. It has an unpleasant taste on it’s own, is average on food and has very little heat. The only thing it seems to have in common with the better/stronger hot sauces is that it causes you gastronomic queasiness, which is meant to be a side effect rather than the main selling point. However given its cheap price point and vulgar name, it’s probably not a bad one to have on standby at a BBQ to give your boozed up mates a chuckle and to stick on a burger.
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