In collaboration with Illumination and Nintendo, Truff released a series of Super Mario Bros. movie hot sauces. With a total of three different hot sauces available through the collection, these condiments appear in bottles inspired by notable characters in the Super Mario Bros. series, this being, Mario, Peach, and Toad. Each hot sauce is infused with truffle, which is apt given how synonymous mushrooms are with the Mario franchise. However, collaboration products, especially food products can be something of a hit or miss, and these pungent hot sauces may not be for everyone.
This is the first time I’ve ever reviewed a food product, but there is without a shadow of a doubt that I love to eat. Outside of writing about and reviewing games, I love to head to local restaurants and try new dishes, seasonal foods, and barbecue with friends. So naturally, I leapt at the offer to give these hot sauces a try.
The packaging of the Truff collaboration sauces themselves are great, each in a glass bottle featuring a slightly textured label that has a print of a specific Super Mario Bros. character. There is even gold inlaid into some of the printed text, which attempts to sell the consumer on the general quality of the product itself. It doesn’t feel cheap or like it was created without thought. It’s clear that both Illumination and Nintendo wanted to create a stand-out collaboration project to celebrate the release of the film.
And they did exactly that. The sauces themselves are fairly thick, and are pungent due to the incorporation of truffle. Of the three, the Peach White Hot Sauce — which is infused with white truffle — had the least heat, but the sweetest taste of the three. I ended up cooking a chicken breast, incorporating the hot sauce into the process to try and infuse some of its flavor into the meat. The end result was interesting enough, as the chicken did end up carrying some of the notes of the hot sauce once it had been fully cooked. It lacked the initial sweetness from the sauce when had as a condiment, but still carried a bit of heat.
I did the same with the Toad Original Hot Sauce, which was a black truffle infused sauce, which had more of a chipotle smell and flavor. The chicken came out about roughly the same, and was about the same level of heat intensity. Overall, this one suited cooking with more than the Peach sauce due to its more earthy smell and taste due to the incorporation of the black truffle.
The Mario Hotter Hot Sauce, on the other hand, I chose to use specifically as a condiment. The hottest of the three, it is probably the best tasting of the sauces. In my opinion, this is because the heat helps cancel out some of the more pungent flavors of the truffle. As you could probably gather at this point, if you don’t like truffle, this may not be for you. Which is the conclusion I came to after eating the Mario sauce with fried chicken and french fries. Because of the incorporation with black truffle, it was hard to find something to pair it with.
Overall, none of the sauces had any real intensity when it came to heat and more or less highlighted the use of an expensive, trendy ingredient — the truffle. Which makes sense, given the collaboration, and because anything too hot may not be suitable for the palettes of such a huge consumer base. These were good, and decent enough on their own. But probably could have been hotter, and maybe incorporated other ingredients alongside the truffles to create a better and more diverse catalog of sauces for the collaboration.
That said, the packaging is high quality and the box itself are great collector’s items. Would I recommend this sauce to anyone I know? Probably not. Mostly because of the lack of any real intense heat, and the overwhelming truffle flavor. But if you can’t get enough of truffles, you’ll probably really enjoy these sauces outside of being collaboration items associated with one of the biggest video game franchises in the world.
The Truff Super Mario Bros. hot sauce are available to purchase online for $69.99.
