Just The Specials: Taco Bell And Omar Apollo’s Disha Hot Hot Sauce

Welcome to the table,

Just The Specials is a column where your lunch buddy Anton grabs the newest food offerings from across the land and tries them out because someone has to do it. It may as well be the person who has big opinions about the way things taste.

I’m a fan of hot sauce. So much so those who know me gift me bottles for gift-giving holidays and pick me up random bottles they find when they are out and about. Now for me, the burn is fine, but I am not interested in something that has no flavor. What I look for in a hot sauce is something that has a complex flavor profile as well as heat to accent the food it is on and not just shock my taste buds into making everything taste like it has a coating of bland pain.

This love for hot sauce has, on occasion, made me try the various offerings from Taco Bell. Some have been winners. I actually keep a bottle of the fire sauce in my fridge that I use often on fries or for basic taco night. If you know you know, but other collaborations they have done have left me wanting. So when they announced that Omar Apollo‘s Disha Hot hot sauce was going to be added to the menu for a limited time, they caught my attention.

The branding on the Disha Hot hot sauce is fantastic. If you check out their website, the link can be found here, it just sells one type of hot sauce. No merch, no complex collection of brands, just … one bottle of hot sauce priced at $15 for one bottle or $30 for two.

Yes, I know how that pricing statement sounds. Go look at the site. As of the time I am typing this, that is how it is set up. You can buy one for $15 or two for $30. It feels like a bit from a late night comedy show and I kind of love that about it. The site itself has such a basic simple layout it’s hard not to stand out in a landscape that pushes a billion options, flavors, and styles of every sauce under the sun.

Taco Bell is currently offering two ways to enjoy this hot sauce, one being in a meal called the Disha Hot Discovery Box that includes three packets of Disha Hot hot sauce, a Cheesy Gordita Crunch, a Doritos Locos Tacos, a Beef Crunchy Taco, chips and Nacho Cheese sauce, along with a medium fountain drink.

The other just being that you can purchase the packets of the Disha Hot hot sauce on their own. Unlike the other hot sauce that Taco Bell has, the Desha Hot hot sauce packets do have a price attached, so my normal “get ten of them” move with the Fire Sauce packets was a little excessive as Door Dash required .25 cents for each pack.

I opted to just get a taco with no lettuce and a Loaded Beef Nacho, which has seasoned beef, refried beans, reduced-fat sour cream, nacho cheese sauce, red sauce, and guacamole on top of tortilla chips, so I could try the Hot Sauce packets as nothing in the Discovery Box was different or new, save the sauce packets.

The verdict? The sauce is not bad at all. The sauce contains, tomato, tomatillo, distilled white vinegar, red onion, lime juice, habanero, toasted chile de árbol, jalapeño, cilantro, garlic, salt, chia seed, and “Mucho Amor.”

While I could not pinpoint the mucho amor, I could for sure detect really complimentary notes of vinegar and toasted chile de árbol, along with lime juice that played off the salt of the chips and the sort of “everything at Taco Bell taste” that taco bell meat has.

I’m not a huge fan of lime juice outside of a mixed drink, but it plays really well in the flavor profile of Omar Apollo’s Disha Hot hot sauce so much so I would buy this if I saw it in the store and it was $15 or less.

Give it a try before it’s gone if you like spice and a fun flavor profile to mix with your various taco bell treats.

Until next time, the art from the Disha Hot website is really rad, and even without this Taco Bell collaboration would have at least had me pick up a bottle and look at it if I had seen it in a retail store. As someone who does not touch much of anything while shopping, that is saying a lot.