Hot Stuff - Dingo Sauce Co.
There is no shortage of novelty “hotter-than-thou” sauces that do damage but severely lack in the taste department. How nice is it to come across a brand that is being driven by a chef with over two decades of experience under his belt?
Dingo Sauce Co. was founded in North Fremantle in 2016 by chilli-enthusiast Leigh Nash, whose cuisine has harboured a weak spot for the intricate flavour balance Asian cooking brings to the table, i.e. the calibration between sweet, spicy, hot and sour. Having grown his own chillies and his dissatisfaction with ready-made sauces plagued with additives, Leigh started to experiment with local produce, finetune and eventually bottle his own variant of his favourite Sriracha sauce.
What started as a hobby, evolved to a professional and commercial level once local demand surged and the outcome of a crowdfunding campaign allowed for the acquisition of equipment to take the operation to the next level and the rest is history, as Dingo Sauce is now widely distributed and has become a favourite amongst chilli-evangelists for a reason.
My first exposure to Dingo Sauce Co. ( https://dingosauceco.com/ ) was their Thai style Chilli Jam, which with the chilli paste having been slow cooked for over ten hours, is an explosion of flavours. It not only adds moderate heat but a flavoursome dimension to any dish with the textured melange of shrimp paste, fish sauce and tamarind that add a nice level of sweetness and depth to the foundation of the Caysan chillies.
What I like about Dingo Sauce Co. are their specialised sauces that authentically take detours from the tried and tested hot sauces trail. An example par excellence is the Korean BBQ sauce, which as the name suggests uses gochujang (Korean chilli paste) and a blend of sesame oil, soy, rice vinegar and honey. Perfect for marinading and dipping, it has become a favourite go-to and allrounder for any grill related exercises.
Given that Dingo started as a riff on Leigh’s favourite sriracha sauce, I was intrigued as to what his reimagined Super-Hot Sriracha was going to be.
Dialling up the heat with the addition of ghost pepper and scorpion chillies, this baby is a tad more intense as the compound impact of red jalapeños and Caysan would suggest, however, heat is not an end in itself as one can tell that there is a delicate balance between the different heat sources and how they are dialled in.
Now, if you really like it next level hot, Dingo’s Widow Maker Hot Sauce will be your go-to as you might have witnessed in an episode of Hot Ones’ season 11, where it was featured. What we got here is an all-out heat attacked fuelled by the unfiltered hotness of six peppers, e.g. Naga Viper, Carolina Reaper, Moruga and Ghost.
While this one is solidly in heat territory with 682,000 SHUs on the Scoville Scale and not recommended to administer in large doses, again there are nuances of lime, smoke and garlic that give this sauce a fiery yet even-tempered, controlled burn.
As Dingo Sauce’s portfolio is consistently growing, I am looking forward to tasting how they are going to channel their alchemy in the future.
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images from company website
