This Real Housewife’s Hot Sauce Brought Tears to My Eyes

There may be a screen dividing us, but you and I are no different, dear reader. In this economy—where the rich wake up every morning and dive into their money pools like Scrooge McDuck while the rest of us cling to hope that student debt relief isn’t just a dream—you, too, crave life’s simple pleasures. The intrinsic pain of our existence begets little treats. These indulgences are enough to keep us hanging on, and lately, my preferred category of treat has become sauces.

I will forever be a drink person (make no mistake: I usually don’t leave the grocery store without a beverage of some kind), but these days, I’m all about viscosity. The thicker the product, the more I want to throw it in my basket. I’m talking salsas, dressings, relishes, and, yes, vinegar counts too; I crave unique bursts of flavor that are jarred or bottled and ready for me to experiment with. My fridge is unfortunately packed with them. Just the other night, my boyfriend was looking for a little bit of butter to spread on a simple piece of toast. We did not have butter, but perhaps he would like some California orange blossom honey, or strawberry rosé vinegar and olive oil for dipping? He did not.

But I was not and will not be deterred from sauce-ploration, especially now that my obsession has intersected with my other favorite thing: celebrity products. When Ubah Hassan, one of the cast members on the rebooted Real Housewives of New York, revealed in a recent episode that she has a line of hot sauces, fittingly called Ubah Hot, I had already purchased a variety pack before the next commercial break. After all, RHONY products are the Moby Dick to my Captain Ahab; I still sail the seas of online marketplaces, hoping I’ll find Ramona Singer’s eponymous pinot grigio or Sonja Morgan’s controversial Tipsy Girl prosecco. I was not missing out on Ubah Hot!

It turns out that my conviction was rewarded: Ubah Hot’s three flavors are all uniquely delicious, even if their formulation is lacking from other sauces sitting in my refrigerator door.

Ubah Hot is not your traditional “hot sauce,” despite being marketed as one. The consistency of these hot sauces is more along the lines of your average jarred cooking base (think Goya’s sofrito, if you’re familiar). Though it’s more chunky than it is fine, I wouldn’t say Ubah Hot is akin to a salsa, either. The textures are blended well enough that you could throw this sauce into just about any dish and your guests would be none the wiser. In that respect, the product certainly functions more like a bottle of hot sauce than it does any other type of dressing.

Functionality is paramount to the Ubah Hot brand, it seems. Each of the bottles includes a little blurb that promises Ubah Hot will turn any dish into something delicious. Hassan said as much herself, while hocking it in the fourth episode of RHONY Season 14. “When I started modeling, I had to eat steamed fish, steamed vegetables, steamed everything,” Ubah said in a confessional. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna die without the flavor of the food,’ and that’s how Ubah Hot was born.”

To put Ubah Hot to the test, I set out on a weeklong series of trials to see if Hassan’s product could stand up to those ambitions. Her utmost entrepreneurial confidence, combined with the fact that the sauce made it onto Oprah’s 2021 list of Favorite Things, assured me that there would be something intriguing about these sauces. I just had to find out what that special factor—or, secret sauce, if you will—might be.

If Ubah Hot’s gorgeous packaging is to be believed, each one of these sauces is a gem—literally. All three flavors, which unsurprisingly range from mild to hot, are named for precious stones. There’s the Fresno Hot (red ruby), Serrano Medium (emerald), and Habanero Hot (yellow tanzanite). All three of these hues represent the colors of Ethiopia, where Hassan’s mother, who inspired the product’s creation, lived after fleeing Somalia during the country’s civil war. The bold bottle design, with its attractive font selection and chic sketch of a high-heeled model, is captivating enough to make you forget that the flavors are strangely named with Spanish words. But Hassan speaks multiple languages, and I’d guess that the lingual diversity of the brand’s buzzwords is meant to reflect both her world travels and the universal nature of each sauce’s intended use.

I knew that if I was going to use Ubah Hot for any meal in particular, it had to be shakshuka. The popular Israeli-by-way-of-North African dish consisting of tomatoes, red peppers, spices, and poached eggs was a staple conversation piece across three recent RHONY episodes. Fellow Real Housewife Erin Lichy talked about her fabled shakshuka for days at the start of the cast’s Hamptons trip, before finally getting around to making it on their last morning, when Hassan broke out her bottles for the rest of the women to try. No test of Ubah Hot could be complete without putting it on some shakshuka myself.

But shakshuka would be the big finale. The sauces had to actually arrive first, and several Amazon reviews with pictures of shattered bottles made me worried that Ubah Hot would be uber-hazardous. Luckily, the products arrived in perfect condition, with the olive oil in each bottle entirely separated from the rest of the ingredients. That sight is always a bit off-putting, but it only takes a quick shake for everything to combine. Well, apart from the Serrano Medium, which unfortunately has continued to separate in my fridge—the other two flavors have remained blended. The nutrition facts are not listed on the Ubah Hot website, which is obnoxious for someone who actively tries to avoid sodium-heavy products (not an easy feat when saddled with a sauce obsession!). But I happily found that in a 30-serving bottle, there’s only about 85 milligrams of sodium per serving, which is not much when just a little Ubah Hot goes a long way.

I tasted each flavor separately before adding them to any other food. The Habanero Hot is definitely the fiery flavor it’s labeled as, though I wouldn’t estimate that its Scoville rating would place it on the spicier end of your average Hot Ones episode. It leaves a pleasant mouth burn for a few minutes after consumption, but that heat never overpowers the actual flavor of the product, which is always my foremost gripe with hot sauce. I want to be able to taste the vinegar, peppers, and whatever else is in that bottle. There’s nothing worse than spending $10 on a gourmet hot sauce to realize it’s a glorified spicy pepper challenge, so I was thankful that the Ubah Hot variety pack’s $60 price point was neither a waste of money nor flavor.

The Serrano Medium is the most flavorful of the three, with its green bell pepper and serrano pepper base ingredients giving the sauce a pleasantly earthy taste. Those that already dislike green bell pepper won’t love it—especially since it requires constant stirring to maintain its fusion—but it’s perfect for those looking for a diversion from the average hot sauce.

The Fresno Mild, however, is the runaway winner of the three, and I don’t just say that because I’m a white person (though I am accepting any and all inbox messages suggesting otherwise). The mild has the ideal level of heat for a more tame hot sauce, and the flavor is downright explosive; that’s probably the whitest way to describe a hot sauce short of saying “hot-diggity-dog,” but it’s true! The red bell pepper combined with Hassan’s mirepoix blend makes the Fresno Mild the perfect addition to any dish, whereas I’d say that Habanero Hot and certainly the Serrano Medium require a bit more thought as to which dish they’d best suit.

Throughout my Ubah Hot trial week, I paired the sauces with burrito bowls, pastas, roasted chicken, and plenty of little snacks. The Fresno Mild and Habanero Hot completely enhanced one of my favorite pasta recipes, which already has an eclectic range of flavors and textures. The Serrano Medium was a great addition to a vegetable-forward mixed greens salad (though more than just a small serving would’ve easily overpowered the rest of the ingredients). As Hassan said, these sauces really do bring out the flavor of any meal, but I also enjoyed adding them to snacks. A rye Wasa cracker topped with no-salt-added cottage cheese and a spoonful of Ubah Hot Fresno Mild? You could not ask for a better, more satisfying nosh.

After a few days of sampling, it was time to live my Real Housewife fantasy. My Brooklyn apartment is far from the luxury of Lichy’s Hamptons home, but I’ve got a stove and a cast iron pan—I’d be damned if my shakshuka wouldn’t be as good as hers. To my surprise and relief, it’s an extremely simple dish to make, very low lifting for a lot of hearty taste. I noted that castmate Jenna Lyons found the Serrano Medium to be way too hot for her, so I paired that one with my shakshuka first, just to see if I might be able to laugh in the face of a splendidly enigmatic designer just this one time. The medium flavor offsets the shakshuka’s taste profile a bit, making for a mouth melange that I can only deem “suspicious.” Perhaps that’s why Lyons was so befuddled?

The Fresno Mild and Habanero Hot pair much more nicely with shakshuka. The more intense heat and acidity of the Habanero dull the fattiness of the eggs a bit. And as a 29-year-old who would like to occasionally forget that he has to start watching his cholesterol, I found that to be a welcome reprieve from the weight of my own mortality. That said, is it any surprise at this point that I found the mild flavor to be the perfect complement to this dish? Not only does it share similar ingredients to shakshuka, but its aromatic formulation brightens up just about anything without making a spectacle of itself.

Housewives products are, to be frank, almost always complete and utter shit. I might not have been blessed by Ramona Pinot yet, but Lisa Vanderpump’s rosé is godawful. You couldn’t swing a Trader Joe’s tote bag without hitting six different rosés that taste the exact same for a smaller price point at the discount grocer. Bethenny Frankel’s Skinnygirl popcorn gets burnt in the microwave if you so much as look at the bag spinning around inside of it. Leah McSweeney’s Married to the Mob streetwear collection is decidedly basic and riddled with lackluster designs. I can’t attest to Ageless by Ramona, but it’s cheaper than a chemical peel, and I’d wager it has about the same visual effect with none of the benefits.

Perhaps Ubah Hot is the rare Housewives product outlier because Hassan was an entrepreneur before she was ever cast as a Real Housewife. She didn’t create this product to capitalize on her fame and platform, but rather because she seems to have a real passion for it. That excitement about the product carries over to its taste and packaging, which cut no corners (and apparently no more hands, given that the latest production run doesn’t seem to have resulted in any shattered bottles).

As a longtime fan of the franchise, it’s plainly refreshing to see a product made by a Housewife that’s not a cash grab, but a celebration of its founder’s culture and personal history. It fits right in with Hassan being hand-picked by the Bravo team to lead a new charge of Housewives, women with more modern sensibilities to bring actual diverse realities to reality television. That trickles right down to the product as well, we simply do not need any more liquor brands, capsule clothing collections, or snake oil passed off as skincare from Housewives. It’s a new day, and thanks to Ubah Hot, it’s gonna be a scorcher out there.