Caramba Hot Sauce – 3 Different Sauces for 3 Different Taste Bud Levels

When in Manila and looking for the perfect hot sauce to use for your dishes at home, it can be hard to figure out which one to turn to. After all, with so many hot sauces abounding in supermarkets today, you don’t want to waste your money on a hot sauce that doesn’t suit your needs. This is where Caramba Hot Sauce comes into the picture.

Ray Orozco, the founder of Caramba Hot Sauce, knows how important chili can be when it comes to food. Let’s face it: crushing peppers into dishes or mixing them into soy sauce with calamansi simply isn’t enough sometimes. Knowing that, Ray created a hot sauce with a lot of heat, but without changing much in flavour. Made with Philippine-grown chill peppers, he harnessed every piece’s heat and flavour into these bottles to make everyone in the country happy. 🙂 Well, we are definitely very happy customers!

See, my family members all have differing tastes when it comes to spiciness levels. My dad and I love all things spicy. And by spicy, I mean SPICY. We like our food best when it makes other people cry – something our taste buds must have picked up after living in Bangkok, Thailand for seven years. The “Extra Hot” Habanero Pepper Sauce is therefore perfect for us.

Fortunately for us, Ray wanted to expand his passion for spice and thus made the Extra Hot Habanero Pepper Sauce. From the intense Red Saving Habanero pepper, this one is definitely the hottest of the bunch. It contains the flavour and heat from local peppers, yet stays authentically Filipino at the same time.

Since the sauce still wasn’t enough to make us cry (when I said we have high spice tolerance levels, I wasn’t kidding!) we still went through our bottles of Habanero Pepper Sauce pretty quickly because we started splashing it onto practically anything that we cooked at home. :p Good stuff. Take it from me!

Now, my brother… he loves spice, too. However, his spice tolerance level isn’t at par with that of mine or my dad’s yet. This makes the Chili Rojo Red Chili Sauce his favorite out of the bunch.

Launched in 1998, the Chili Rojo Red Chili Sauce was actually the first product that Caramba ever introduced – and is still the Filipino favorite to date. It has a lot of heat from Bird’s Eye Chili in it, which is three times hotter than Tabasco pepper, and makes my brother happy whenever he is need of some spice in his food. 🙂

My mom, on the other hand, hates spicy food, in general. She is the type of person who will cry if she eats something spicy by mistake and gulps down three glasses of water the minute something gets a bit too spicy for her taste. She was very game when I asked her to try Caramba Hot Sauce with us, though. While she couldn’t really take the Habanero and the other one, though, she surprisingly loved the Chili Verde Green Chili Sauce.

According to her, the Chili Verde Green Chili Sauce has a slight spicy taste, but without being too overwhelming. Not as spicy as red chill peppers, the Chili Verde Green Chili Sauce has a unique flavour that is mildly bitter and hot – the perfect addition for those who want a bit more flavour in their food but cannot take spiciness the way that we spice lovers do.

So, whether you love extreme spice like I do or can’t take spice at all, Caramba Hot Sauce has something to suit anybody’s taste at home. Make sure you check them out when in Manila! 🙂