Apfelblut Hot Sauce by Chantico and RT(HD)X Blend

American hot sauces are of course great and delicious, but also quite expensive and in this respect Russian crafters who create original sauces with similar ingredients at a reasonable price are very good and, of course, I am glad that this scene is growing and that producers are finding very unexpected forms of cooperation.

Last week we had two BBQ-parties, one was on the occasion of a close friend's visit from Moscow, the other - birthday of my wife's brother, and since one of them fell on the apple festival, I decided to surprise the guests and bought a new sauce Apfelblut, made by favorite Russian producers Chantico and RT(HD)X.

The name hints that the sauce is applesauce, but that's not quite true. The sauce is based on a fruit puree of red orange, white guava and kalamansi (the most popular citrus fruit in the Philippines), with orange habanero (100,000 to 350,000 on the Scoville scale) and some spices. And the apples are represented in the form of the eponymous black elderberry apple cider, brewed by RT(HD)X last year to some eerily secret recipe with the support of renowned in Russia spicy popularizers Chilibros.co

The sauce was a success! Sourness of apples, delicate consistency of fruit puree, smell of tropical fruits, very unusual taste, plus natural spice coming in waves - such things you want (and need) to praise, and the Western colleagues could not even dream about such creativity as a combination of apples, elderberries and kalamansi.

Actually the first test Apfelblut was with pork tenderloin shish kebab and the sauce proved very good adding fruit notes to juicy meat, but the second experiment turned out to be even more awesome and interesting.

Apples and citrus fruits are rich in vitamin C, which has a "loosening" effect on meat, so for the second party we added something like a tablespoon of this sauce to the marinade (salt, onion, pepper) to the pork neck part, so that after less than an hour the meat became very soft and was much more tender than what was cooked the usual way.

Naturally - the meat became noticeably spicier, but for me that's more of a plus than a minus.