Just had lunch at a Taco Bell for the first time in awhile, and tried their new Diablo sauce. It’s reasonably hot for a Taco Bell sauce, but the first thing that jumped out at me was a very strong, unusual flavor the sauce has. Not necessarily a bad flavor, but it’s so different from the typical Taco Bell flavor palette that it was off-putting at first. The closest (but not entirely accurate) comparison I can come up with is to those cola-flavored “Bottlecap” candies I used to get on Halloween.
Googling gets me no good answers. The official line is it’s made from “Aji panca, chipotle and chili peppers”. Don’t know what aji panca peppers are supposed to taste like, so maybe it’s that. It’s. It’s not chipotle pepper- I know what that tastes like. Someone else asked about the flavor on a message board and it was speculated to be cilantro. Maybe an artificial lab-created attempt at cilantro flavor, possibly…
By the way, I’m pretty sure there was a recent post about Diablo sauce, and I made a valiant effort to try and find it, but no luck with thread title searches for “Taco Bell” or “Diablo”.
