After many meals made before now, we finally came up with a couple of uses for this sauce by the great folks at Nando’s. We didn’t mean to let this slip for this long, but it’s easy to get behind when you have as much to use and taste as we do.

That said, the task at hand was to see what sort of culinary magic we could create with this cooking sauce. Honestly, we don’t use too many cooking sauces like this…so we brainstormed some ideas and came up with one we wanted to use for this sauce. As for it’s composition, it has an ingredients list which looks like this:

Ingredients: water, carrots, fruit chutney (sugar, vegetables, vinegar, fruit, acetic acid, caramel color, salt, guar gum, xanthan gum), sugar, onions, apricot jam (pectin, citric acid, potassium sorbate), modified corn starch, white vinegar, worcestershire sauce (2.5%)(water, caramel color, worcestershire, xanthan gum, sodium benzoate), honey, salt, lemon juice, natural flavor (chicken), celery, sunflower oil, cayenne pepper, cilantro, black pepper, potassium sorbate (preservative), lactic acid, sodium lactate (preservative), calcium-EDTA, cinnamon, dehydrated African birds-eye pepper (Peri-Peri pepper)

Some good stuff in there, but also some not so good. Quite a few preservatives, which we suppose was done to make this sauce as shelf-stable as possible. Still, the more chemical-sounding names we see on the list, the more skeptical we are before even tasting it. That, plus the fact that the chile peppers are the LAST item on the list, made us wonder just how chilehead-friendly this sauce would be.

Our intended victim: some thick boneless pork chops. The apricot in the sauce seemed like it would be a good taste to go with “the other white meat.”

We knew that grilling with this sauce would be a nice touch, especially to see how it did compared to other quasi-BBQ sauces we have used in recent months. Warming our grill, we added just a touch of Herbal Red spice mix for taste to the chops, and then carefully laid them upon the grill to cook. These pork chops were pretty damn thick, so it actually took a while to get them cooked up well enough before adding the cooking sauce.

The one thing that we had to remember to do first is taste it before we cooked with it. To our pleasure, it’s a good taste. Fortunately for the chileheads who may want to try it, the title “Sweet Apricot” doesn’t translate to being too sweet. The apricot flavor is rather mellow, actually, and there is overall great fruit flavor without the sweetness like biting into the actual fruit or those overly-sweetened cooking sauces we’ve all tried from the local supermarket. For heat, the sauce is labeled as “medium,” but our tolerance put it squarely in the mild range. You catch a hint of the peppery heat, but scarcely enough to tingle your heat sensors. Probably a great sauce for those who just want a little heat.

Back to our grilling. The chops cooked up fairly quickly over medium-high heat, and Joe lathered them up with cooking sauce near the end. They ended up with about 5-10 minutes of being grilled before making it off and onto the serving plate. You can see them cooking in the above picture.

Finally, they made their way to our dinner table. Made medium-well, this turned out to be a perfect choice of meat and about the right level of done-ness for the flavor. Unlike some sauces, the grilling process mellowed out the flavor too much….which we wouldn’t have known unless we had tried it straight first. The subtleties of the flavor were lost, but there is still a lingering hint of apricot and Peri-Peri that you will enjoy. Pairing this up with side dishes was made more challenging as we wanted to not overwhelm the delicate flavor of the sauce with something strong. All in all, the dinner and cooking was a smashing success.

Overall recommendation: Despite our foibles in grilling, this is a good sauce. When we used it poured over finished meat (like broiled/baked chicken), it was a better flavor than on the grill. The straight taste is too good to muck it up with too much preparation, so just pour it liberally over what you like. Even as a dipping sauce, this did great as well. It won’t please the heat-seekers, but not everything has to be hotter than Hades. For those who want good flavor and just a touch of heat, this one’s sure to please. Enjoy!

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