We Gave In And Bought Some Truff Hot Sauce

Without having even tasted the sauce I can say that the Truff marketing team is brilliant.

Update: We’ve since tried all three of their sauces.

Today we wanted to talk about the strange phenomenon of Truff Hot Sauce. Overall we feel like we’re fairly in touch with what hot sauces are popular on the market, from scouring r/hotsauce, watching Hot Ones and following folks on Instagram, but one sauce kept coming up from friends that are not all that into hot sauce. “Have you tried that Truff stuff?” “Truffles in hot sauce how crazy is that?!” Without many people having even tried the sauce, it was going viral and was widely talked about.

We finally gave in after seeing the 100th Sponsored ad on Instagram and to our shock, one bottle of Truff wass $17.98. We balked at the price initially. $18 for some fancy hot sauce that I don’t even know if I’m going to like? Sounded ridiculous. Thankfully there was a 10% discount…down to $16. And then free shipping, so overall the blow was softened and all things considered the sauce is really about $10 if you think that most sauce shops charge flat rate of $5.99 to $7.99 for shipping.

20,000+ likes on Facebook, 46,000+ followers on Instagram in just over one year is nothing to scoff at. The first teaser post marked 12/1/17 as the release date for Truff and they somehow managed to lock down “sauce” as a username on Instagram. It was even voted as an “Oprah’s Favorite Thing” in 2018, the only hot sauce to ever make the list, and she clearly knows her hot sauces right? All of the above led to a lot of skepticism about how good the sauce could be, but we were willing to withhold further judgement until we had the sauce in our hands.

The packaging is great. The bottle itself is stylish and everything about it feels classy, like you’ve joined a prestigious club that only let’s the finest sauce-lovers in. Looks-wise Truff gets a 5/5, but opening the cap we were hit with a whiff of vinegar and something synthetic. Off to a bad start.

Pouring it is nice and smooth and almost feels like pouring a can of paint (in a good way). The color is consistent and you can see no remnants of the seeds in the TRUFF® Chili Blend (Red Chili Peppers, Vinegar, Organic Sugar, Garlic, Salt, Black Truffle). Moving down the ingredients list you see two (probably new to you) ingredients, “Lycopene and Glycerin” which the bottle claims is for color. Lycopene is a plant-based additive that works hard to keep it’s parent red in color. Know how you get a redness in your dishes after eating spaghetti or other tomato-based foods? That’s mostly thanks to Lycopene. As for Glycerin, it’s a natural additive that helps hold color, create stability in the sauce and add a tiny bit of sweetness.

We’ve had truffle-based dishes before, but this iteration of truffle was not appealing. It’s such an interesting flavor that the first time you try it your mouth is extremely confused like, “bruh, what did you put in here?” We tried it on chips, tater tots, chicken bites, tacos, and a few other things, but none of them were a good match with the sauce for us. The truffle flavoring is so overpowering it’s tough to taste the heat or the flavor of the peppers. There’s a tiny kick at the end, but this is mainly a glorified ketchup.

This is not to say that some folks won’t enjoy the sauce. Everyone has their own tastes and this is just our opinion, but, don’t buy it just because of the marketing. For those hardcore truffle fans, this is probably right up your alley, but for us, the flavor and heat/spice were not a match for the price tag. Another thing that has us giving a thumbs down is the secrecy around the spice blend used. Many hot sauce makers are proud to reveal what peppers are bringing the heat in a sauce, but Truff is extremely secretive and just points to their registered trademark blend. We’d guess cayenne or something like a bird’s eye, but who knows.

Overall, we give Truff a 2/5. Originality is as high as it gets, label is great as well, but that’s where it ends for us. Truff marketing team is to be admired for pushing this sauce so hard and drumming up interest. Best hot sauce campaign we’ve ever seen.

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