Of Strawberries and Scorpions

Hello again spice lovers, happy tuesday oncemore.

Today I have for you a special offering from the chilli pepper company, made in conjunction with the Fire Breathing Idiot, Ted Barrus.

Some of you will know the guy, while some of you may be less familiar with his work but Ted is another chilli reviewer, preferring to put out sensationalist videos rather than written reviews.

From the way he can describe chillies and sauces professionally in a single take, the man clearly has a lot of skill but his challenge oriented approach and ridiculous video effects made me quite unclear what to expect of a sauce tailored to his tastes.

Before we find out about the sauce, however, let’s take a brief look at its packaging.

Like almost every sauce the Chilli Pepper Company produce, The FBI’s Ball Breaker shows their logo in purple on a bold-coloured cracked earth background with the name in worn white all caps. It’s nothing groundbreaking, as it were, but the text does pop rather nicely with its black outline and drop shadow.

For this particular product, they’ve chosen a deep brown background to compliment the rich red of the sauce itself and given us a fun cartoony rendition of the man it was made for, the Fire Breathing Idiot, doing exactly what his stage name suggests.

The packaging is simple, elegant, well printed and gets across its main point well. This is a sauce designed for reviewers and connoisseurs, not your average joe. But is it as “very hot” as the bottle says? Well, it gets its heat from a trinidad scorpion and 7-pot cross so probably but let’s make sure.

If you, like me, were expecting a massive delay on the heat, like you’d get with any other trinidad scorpion, prepare to be horribly horribly wrong. This sauce hits instantly!

Nor, truth be told, is it quite the insanity I expected. The Ball Breaker is hot, certainly, but it’s only a little hotter than most ghost sauces, coming in at about a four and a half and quickly building to a

at the upper back of my mouth.

For most, this would be more than insane enough but, for someone like me, this sauce provides a very strong, yet still pleasant burn that I’d happily spread all over my meals. And it has the taste for that aswell.

This sauce may be strong and punchy with its heat but so too is its tomato, garlic and sweet red bell pepper flavour. It has the slightest hints of both sour and sweet with a fruity tang to it aswell, all supported beautifully by its most unusual signature ingredient, the underlying but unmistakeable fresh strawberry juice.

I’ve never heard of a strawberry sauce before and, when combined with all the rather savoury flavours in this particular product, there was no way I could imagine it working out but it did. I’ve been carefully consuming fingerfuls all the way through this review. It’s just so delicious!

The smoked paprika content is barely noticeable, if I’m honest, but it does round out the end of this sauce’s taste, just as it’s fading away. Everything in it just comes together so wonderfully, I am enthralled by this sauce.

But we can’t just end things there, there’s something thing I’ve missed. How does it pour?

Take another look at that second picture and you can hopefully see the consistency. It’s thick and gloopy. Holds its shape on the spoon. There’s no safety cap here but you just don’t need it, you cannot pour on unwanted amounts of this sauce.

I struggled a bit in getting my first spoonful out the bottle but the sauce soon began to flow a little, despite its thickness. I was a little unsure on the solidity of the sauce at first but it’s always good to know it hasn’t been watered down and its certainly worth slapping the bottle for.

I’ll be using this on burgers, chips and tacos at the very least, with plenty more uses sure to present themselves in due time.

If you like ghost pepper and above, get this sauce. You will not regret it.