Cherry Bomb

I have a weakness for cherry peppers.. So when Hell Fire Detroit sent over their Cherry Bomb, it had my attention before the cap was even off. My excitement may have also kept me from taking a picture of the bottle before I tried it. So the gap at the top of that photo is a testament to the deliciousness imo.

Here's what it does. It opens sweet and bright, a real cherry note, not a vague fruitiness but the actual thing I like about cherry peppers, and that brightness is the first thing you taste. Then you do what I did, which is put a little more on. And a little more. Cherry Bomb has this quality where the sweetness keeps pulling you back in, so you keep reaching for it, and while you're distracted by how good it tastes the heat quietly gains ground. It's an honest medium that creeps rather than announces itself. By the time you notice it's actually got some warmth to it, you've already decided you love the bottle.

The finish is the part that sold me on where this belongs. As the heat builds, the sweetness fades a little, but it never separates out, this isn't a sweet sauce with a burn bolted onto the back. The cherry and the heat feel like the same thing the whole way through, one integrated sauce rather than two phases taking turns. That cohesion is exactly why it works on everything I threw at it, and I threw a lot: pizza, a burrito, a sandwich, a burger. There was no dish where it felt out of place, which is the whole ballgame for a sauce that wants to live in your rotation.

That's the case for Field Leader, and I want to be clear about why it's the top of the board and not just a sauce I happen to like. A field leader isn't the hottest thing or the most clever thing, it's the one you actually reach for the most, the one that makes the widest range of food better without asking you to think about it. Cherry Bomb is a sauce that makes you want to use more of it, on nearly anything, and then rewards you for it. That's the rare combination. Plenty of sauces are tasty and plenty are spicy, but the ones that are both, and universal enough to go on everything without a second thought, are the ones that earn the crown. This is one of them, and the brightness the cherries bring gives it a lift that puts it a step ahead of the rest of the board.

For the record on what it is: Hell Fire Detroit fire-roasts their chiles, and they call this one "smoky sweet with a pleasant sting," a medium in the 100 to 3,500 Scoville range. I'll be honest that the smoky part isn't what jumps out to me, I get the sweet and the bright first, with at most a faint smokiness hanging around in the background rather than leading. But that's the beauty of it landing where it does: the sauce is doing something more balanced than any single descriptor, and every part of it is in service of making you want the next bite.

Verdict: Field Leader. The new top of the hot sauce board. Tasty, bright, sneaky-warm, and universal enough that I stopped looking for things to put it on and started putting it on everything. A sauce that makes you reach for it again is doing the one thing a leader has to do, and Cherry Bomb does it better than anything else I've tasted.