Most food bloggers will do promoted posts, where a company will pay them to create a recipe using their product, and then post about it while gushing about how amazing it made their recipe, and they couldn’t imagine using anything else unless they were paid triple the fee in which case fuck this thing.

I have a feeling I won’t be getting that opportunity after this post.

I went to Kroger (not affiliated with this post) last week to get some goodies to make crockpot ribs.  I can’t remember where I got the idea, I probably saw that baby back ribs on sale in the weekly circular, at the same time as I stumbled across a Buzzfeed post of the “377 crockpot rib recipes that you should me making right now!!!!”

Anyways, I figured I would make them Asian style, and make my own BBQ sauce.  I wanted to use honey, soy sauce, garlic, and ketchup.  That’s a good sauce!

And then I saw the bottle of ketchup above, just sitting on a grocery shelf, saying “come get me, you’ve always wanted to have me, buy me and I will make sweet BBQ love to your ribs”.

So of course I had to get it, not just because you always have to buy talking food, but because these two things are awesome.  Ketchup is awesome (shut up you little hipster fuck ketchup is delicious and anyone that tells you otherwise is lying or someone you should not hang around with especially if they call it catsup what is wrong with those people).  Sriracha is awesome.  So this has to be a perfect match.

I pulled the ingredients together and started cooking, and about 10 minutes later I tasted everything and realized something was very off.

Now here’s where I have to confess my cardinal sin: I didn’t know what the ketchup tasted like before I started making the sauce.  I know, it’s terrible, I should never have done it.  Gordon Ramsay would cast me on Hell’s Kitchen just so he could make an example out of me and berate me in front of millions of people.

So I said to myself, the honey tasted good, the soy sauce is fine, the garlic is great oh fuck no it can’t be the magical talking ketchup can it?

And that’s where I found out that Heinz needs to fire their entire product development staff.

Sriracha has a very bright, spicy, garlicky flavor, with just a hint of sweetness.

Apparently the product development people at Heinz tasted Sriracha sauce and their taste buds were so broken that they said, “hey this tastes like a bunch of wood chips took a shit in my mouth, let’s see if we can work that into a ketchup.”

I’m not kidding, this was awful.  Like, it’s ketchup, and it’s got some ketchup flavor, but it’s all elbowed out by this rotten smokiness that ruins everything.

And that’s when I discovered something that – again – I should have noticed earlier.

THERE IS NO ACTUAL SRIRACHA IN THEIR SRIRACHA KETCHUP!!!

Nope, none.  It’s right there on the label, I know.  “Sriracha flavor”.  Couldn’t put actual Sriracha in it.  Maybe Big Sriracha doesn’t want to have anything to do with Big Ketchup.  Maybe Heinz did call them and it got sent straight to voicemail, and Big Sriracha lost its password and never got the message.

Now, this “Sriracha flavor”.  I looked through the ingredients of this abominable chip turd catsup, and compared them with those of delicious tomato-y sweet real ketchup.  The additional ingredient to the wood poop one: paprika.

Paprika adds a smoky flavor to things (hence the wood chip turd taste).  There is no smoky flavor in Sriracha.  None.

Here are some items or flavors that I would more closely associate with Sriracha than paprika:

• Chocolate sauce
• Peas
• Yorkshire pudding
• Actual pudding
• Kimchi
• Non-smoky poop

If you want to have Sriracha-flavored ketchup, buy some ketchup, buy some Sriracha, and mix the two together in whatever proportion you want.  You will have a tasty condiment that you can use on just about anything.

Do not buy this product if you ever want to use it on food.  This product is good on absolutely nothing.  If, by some chance, someone gives this to you, or it gets bequeathed to you in the will of your racist uncle that gave you noogies and never really cared for you, here is what you should do:

1. Take the bottle from them, smile politely, and thank them (i.e. lie).
2. Remove the cap from the bottle.
3. Pull off the protective seal from the top.
4. Screw the top back on about 2/3 of the way, so it’s not totally locked on.
5. Throw the bottle at them.
6. Watch the bottle contents explode all over them.
7. Scream “HOW’S IT FEEL TO BE A BIG SMOKY TURDFACE HAHA LOOK AT THE SMOKE TURD!!!”