If you love the taste of tikka masala sauce, but wish it had some kick to it, then you’ve found a go-to in Inner Beauty Hot Sauce. Its mustard base, spices, and tropical flavor are a blast for your tastebuds. But how usable is a sauce that’s so specific? And does its heat match the exotic flavors that the bottle holds? Let’s dig into Inner Beauty Hot Sauce and see what treasures are inside.
Table of Contents
Overall Flavor
Inner Beauty Hot Sauce’s ingredient list is seriously filled to the brim with good stuff and maps very much to what you’d expect from a tasty Caribbean-style hot sauce: Mustard, distilled vinegar, scotch bonnet peppers, papaya juice, pineapple juice, sugar, orange juice, mango, vegetable oil, honey, molasses, spices.
The mustard used as the base of Inner Beauty is a white wine mustard as they list chardonnay as one of the mustard’s ingredients. Yep that’s right, you even get a little chardonnay in this sauce. Seeing the mustard is the predominant ingredient, it make for a much more gourmet experience than a simple spicy yellow mustard. And a little less earthiness than what you’d get from brown mustards.
That mustard hits you immediately, followed by the tropical sweet tang of the citrus and tropical fruits and the sweet bite of those scotch bonnets. Don’t let the sound of scotch bonnets deter you though, because this is definitely not a “knock you on your ass” kind of heat (and more on that below.) And scotch bonnets have a delicious Caribbean sweetness that’s always a great complement to tropical fruits.
And then there’s the “spices.” The vague ingredient belies a ton of flavor here. Obviously turmeric is present as mustard is here,too, but there’s so much more. The entire eating experience just tastes exotic, like you’re insta-creating a Caribbean meal just by adding Inner Beauty to it. It’s tangy, flavorful, and doesn’t just focus all its energy on heat.
In terms of sodium, this sauce keeps things pretty lean – 15mg per serving or 1% of your daily allowance. It’s good to see the big flavor of this sauce being driven by other bold spices.
Heat Balance
Scotch bonnets sit in the extra-hot range on the Scoville scale, ranging (like habaneros) from 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville heat units. But Inner Beauty doesn’t come close to those heights at all.
The heat here is medium, warming up your tongue quickly and after a few bites it’ll make it to the back of your throat. It builds over time, so it’s easier to control how much of a kick you want from this sauce. Granted, you’ll be using this more for the spiced flavor it brings to the table, so you may have a heavier hand than with other hot sauces. But it won’t range too far into the spicy danger zone.
Think somewhere in the fresh serrano/lower cayenne pepper level of heat. 15,000 to 35,000 SHU would be our guess to a range. It’s certainly a very eatable range for most.
Usability
Mustard-based sauces are tough on usability. You won’t go picking up Inner Beauty to use as a daily driver hot sauce, but you’ll be surprised how far Inner Beauty will go with some kitchen experimentation.
This works really well with veggies, chicken, and steak. I also tried this as a salad dressing mixer with my balsamic and I loved the combo. I’m a fan of mustard, though, so if you’re totally a non-mustard alien (yes, I said it), then you might want to skip this sauce.
I also love tikka masala sauce, and this is the spicy version to me. It’s a very complex flavor, so much so that it turns most meals into something a little more special. The spices are strong and do have the ability to take over a dish with their taste, but I don’t think it completely overwhelms. Think of it as a statement sauce. When you use it, it can’t be ignored.
This bottle spout is about an inch thick, so that’s a good indicator that you’ll be using probably a few tablespoons whenever you open the bottle.
Collectibility
I love the tiki vibes Inner Beauty gives off from the label. It makes me feel like I’m getting a homemade Caribbean sauce. And really the sauce’s flavor is a stand-out, so points there, too. It’s a really unique eating experience. It won’t be for everyone, but for those who love it, it’s certainly a cool one to talk about in a collection.
The Score
Inner Beauty Hot Sauce – a Caribbean-style sauce – focuses on spice and flavor first. It’s a mustard-based sauce, so its usability is slightly limited. But its style and flavor add to its cool factor in a collection.
| FINAL SCORE | 4 |
| Overall Flavor | 4.5 |
| Heat Balance | 4 |
| Usability | 3 |
| Collectibility | 4.5 |
| X-Factor | 4 |
I like to add a bit of honey to this to make a spicy honey mustard, tastes spectacular.
Goes great on grilled chicken or pork chops.
This is not nearly as hot as the original by Chef Chris Schlesinger of Boston’s East Coast Grill. This is more like the mild version of old but still has that Caribbean zing with the sweetness of mango. Also note the original recipe(s) used plain old yellow mustard like the recipe in Chris’ cookbook “Big Flavors Of The Hot Sun”. Another difference is the original also contained peanut oil. Chris did a demo on foodthinkers.com with the following recipe, there are several ingredients missing from the original recipe: papaya and pineapple juices, white vinegar, molasses, allspice and chili powder Ingredients… Read more »
fyi
inner beauty has long and storied history
the recipe can be found several places
https://www.seriouseats.com/2007/02/chris-schlesinger-gets-saucy.html