When there's an opportunity, I'm mixing sriracha sauce in with ketchup for potatoes, eggs, and anything else I might eat with either sriracha or ketchup. Sriracha sauce's flavor is too intense for some things alone. Adding the sweet delicious flavor of ketchup to the spicy chili pepper and garlic flavor of sriracha sauce results in a delicious mix.
For a long time before seeing this ketchup, I figured the smartest thing (Kraft)Heinz could do is throw gobs of money at Huy Fong Foods to either license the brand or buy it outright. Then combine the leading ketchup with the leading sriracha sauce to make a new gold standard in specialty ketchup.
Sriracha isn't a trademark, so anyone can make a "Sriracha Sauce," but nobody can do it like Huy Fong. I've tried a few different brands and they can't get the flavor right. Throughout the U.S., if you ask for sriracha sauce at a restaurant, you're asking for and expecting Huy Fong's version.
The labeling is done well. It's made to look a lot like a bottle of Huy Fong Sriracha sauce.
But turn the bottle around and you'll see it's made by Red Gold, a company that specializes in canned and processed tomato products. The ingredients show that this is simply Red Gold's ketchup mixed with actual Huy Fong's sriracha sauce. I'm happy to see that. Don't mess with what works.
I decided to take this ketchup head to head with my typical mix of sriracha and ketchup. I ended up putting more sriracha sauce in with my ketchup than the Sriracha Ketchup includes, so I diluted it with more ketchup. At about 1:3 the two ketchup mixes had the roughly the same spice level, so that's probably the ratio Red Gold uses.
Trying the Sriracha Ketchup, I noticed that it had a sweeter, more tomatoey flavor than my own concoction. At the same spice level, it had noticeably less garlic flavor. I consider this a loss because the balance of garlic and chili pepper flavors in Huy Fong's sauce is what makes it so special. The flavor of the peppers carries through a bit better, as does the spice.
The spice level is pleasant, not anywhere near overwhelming for my tastes. For reference, I can eat a typical jalapeno's pieces raw without displeasure but wouldn't be doing that for a spicier pepper.
The texture of the Red Gold-made ketchup was smoother than my own mixture, probably due to thorough industrial-scale mixing. Visually, you can see larger particles of peppers in the Sriracha Ketchup, but on the tongue you won't notice a difference in texture from pure ketchup.
Overall, this is a good ketchup. I'll use and enjoy it until I run out of it. Will I rebuy it? I doubt it. I'm pretty value conscious and smaller specialty bottles of ketchup carry a premium. Plus I like to stock regular ketchup and pure sriracha sauce separate in my fridge, and have no issue with the inconsistency of mixing them myself.
For a standardized specialty ketchup, it does its job fairly deliciously. It gets a mark off for using a low enough sriracha-sauce-to-ketchup ratio that the garlic flavor is drowned out too much.
