Well, it’s been a while since I have reviewed a wing sauce…so what better way to get back into the game than with one of the selection from Monty’s Gourmet Foods. While the spicier wing sauces were beckoning to me, I opted to go with the Roasted Garlic Wing Sauce because I really enjoy garlicky sauces a great deal. Few garlic sauces seem to retain much in the way of heat, but if any sauce can do that…Monty’s can.

One problem, if you can call it that, was that we don’t make a whole lot of chicken wings at home these days. Due to diet restrictions and just an overall concern for our dietary health, our deep-fryer is on indefinite hiatus except for special occasions. So, the “challenge” for this sauce was to find some other uses aside from using it strictly for chicken wings. As an aspiring gourmand-wannabe, I took up this challenge with a few suggestions for help. Here is the description of the sauce from the MGF website:

This one is all about the garlic! Super duper garlic flavor and smell sets this wing sauce onto a level of pure goodness that cannot be beat! If you like garlic, you will love this wing sauce. Your wings will thank you, your guests will thank you, and your mouth will thank you for getting this sauce.

Well, I asked Monty for a few other suggestions for how to use this sauce outside the norm. Those in hand, I set off to examine this sauce a little closer. The ingredients look like this:

Ingredients: water, vinegar, peppers (red, cayenne), salt, natural butter flavor, canola oil, onion powder, granulated roasted garlic, garlic powder, xanthan gum, citric acid

First things first. While I wasn’t going to make chicken wings, I could still find a way to use it on chicken to get that similar taste thang going. Seen above are a couple of pedestrian pieces of fried chicken from one of our local eateries. I was going to make these into Roasted Garlic chicken pieces worthy of my chilehead status. How to do this? Pretty simple, really. I just took the chicken, put the pieces into a plastic container with a sealable lid, added a modicum of sauce, and shook it up.

As you can see from the picture above, the Roasted Garlic chicken just looks a lot better than the regular ol’ fried chicken. Tastewise, it’s a revelation of garlicky goodness. Slightly tart from the vinegar base, this sauce adds great garlic flavor that will make you vampire-repellant for at least an hour after your meal. As for heat, that was the bigger surprise. This sauce packs a little heat to it, moreso than expected. I’d call the heat about 6.5/10 on my heat scale, with a little accumulation the more I ate. The heat profile was very cayenne in taste, which was fine by me since I like the cayenne flavor. It was good enough that I let nary a drop of sauce shed by the chicken to go to waste.

The suggestion that I found most curious was to use this sauce as salad dressing. You usually don’t think of this kind of sauce being able to be used that wat, but I was looking for something, anything, to make my rather ordinary salad choices more interesting. So, with salad in hand, I added a huge dollop to a garden salad and set about the task of wolfing it down. The results? Thumbs up for the most part. Unlike a vinegar-and-oil dressing, this sauce didn’t really have that oil component to dull out the tartness of the vinegar…which I found to be a little distracting. Love the flavor, but I may have to mix this sauce with something else just to get over the vinegar dominance in the flavor.

Lastly, I used this as a straight-up dipping sauce. For the most part, it was a good choice. From meat to veggies, it was tough to go wrong with this sauce. It went well with most choices, but I found that I liked it so much with my french fries that I’d use it in place of catsup. Yummy!

Overall recommendation: For a sauce that I was unsure would be all that noteworthy judging from the outside of the bottle, this one turned out to be pretty darn good. Tasty and full of garlic flavor, this one had enough heat to keep me happy without shorting out my heat sensors. Don’t just save it for your chicken wings, as it will do well to flavor up a variety of other foods. Use it for yourself and see what you think. Enjoy!

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