Review: I tried the New Mountain Dew Baja Blast Hot Sauce because you probably won’t be able to
After what felt like forever, I finally received the all-new Mountain Dew Baja Blast hot sauce, and well… it’s very interesting! This was a PR gift from MTN Dew, but there was no monetary exchange (tbh for a drop like this, I’m happy to be paid in spicy food).
To give credit where credit is due, the packaging and branding are completely immaculate, and the whole kit, from the shipping box to the interior crate, to all of the branded swag, looks amazing.
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Baja Blast Hot Sauce Review
I give this hot sauce… drumroll… a 2/10 *laughing emoji*
While it was super fun to try, this is not something that I would actually want to eat. The press kit and PR images show it being served with chips and salsa, and the kit itself comes with a taco stand, but I would absolutely not eat this on tacos. Or pizza, or most of the foods we commonly have hot sauce with.
Where to get the new Mountain Dew hot sauce
Unfortunately, the Baja Blast hot sauce is not available for sale anywhere. Previously there was a single OPEN bottle on eBay, gross, but the listing has since been taken down.
The 2020 Mountain Dew hot sauce that was released sells for $200 on eBay, so I would expect the price to be similarly outrageous once Baja Blast hits the reseller market.
The above-board way to try to get a bottle was through MTN Dew’s official sweepstakes, which ended on Feb 8, 2023.
How spicy is it?
By taste alone, this hot sauce is not very hot for a habanero hot sauce. In fact, by my best guess I would say that it’s not even as spicy as Sriracha, which uses much milder chili peppers.
While the company (to my knowledge) did not release the official tested SHU, my estimate based on taste and personal spicy food experience is that it’s around 1,000 SHU. That’s compared to an actual habanero chili pepper at 100,000-350,000 SHU, and jalapeños which range from 2,000-8,000 SHU.
Yes, biting into a raw jalapeño is MUCH spicier than this hot sauce in my experience.
What does it taste like?
Unsurprisingly, this hot sauce tastes just like tropical lime soda! In all honesty, I have never actually tried Baja Blast soda, but to me the hot sauce tastes a lot like regular Mountain Dew as my best reference point.
I expected it to be a regular, medium-spicy habanero hot sauce, but it literally tastes like slightly-spicy soda that is the consistency of salad dressing. It is SICKLY sweet, and aside from a little bit of heat, I don’t detect the flavors of other ingredients (tomatillo, onion powder, cilantro, coriander).
What would this hot sauce go well with?
In my opinion, this hot sauce wouldn’t go great with anything. It has such a soda-y flavor that I do not think it would go well with any savory food. I actually tried it out with vanilla ice cream because it has more of a dessert flavor profile than savory, plus I mixed it with seltzer to see if I could reconstitute it back into soda. You can see how those experiments went here.
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