One of the nice things about our trip to the Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire was the opportunity to again hang out and chat a little with some friends in the hot & spicy food world. In the spirit of this, we both spent some time hanging out with David Rock and his crew from Nando’s. We’ve had a chance to try some of the Nando’s products before such as their Medium Peri-Peri hot sauce, their Hot Peri-Peri Marinade, and their Sweet Apricot Peri-Peri Cooking Sauce…all of which were really darn good. We surveyed their displayed products and picked out a few to briefly taste to see which ones to bring home so that we could try and use them in our own kitchen. This sauce, Lemon Peri-Peri Cooking Sauce, was at the top of our short list because of its great taste. The description of the sauce itself reads like this:

Fresh Lemon – An East African Cooking Sauce made with sun-ripened lemons blended with African spices, Coriander & a hint of Peri-Peri.

One look at the heat rating, however, shows that precious little of the pepper is shaded…meaning it’s considered a milder sauce. Everything we review can’t be hot enough to sear your tastebuds, so we opted to try a milder sauce to see if the flavor when cooked lived up to the taste preview we had at the show. Looking at the list of ingredients, we see:

Ingredients: water, onions, sunflower oil, lemon juice (2%), sugar, natural flavors (chicken, lemon, celery oleoresin, nutmeg oleoresin), artificial flavor (ketchup spice), white vinegar, garlic, modified corn starch, salt, cilantro, egg yolk, black pepper, propylene glycol alginate, onion powder, xanthan gum, lemon, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, dehydrated African Birds Eye pepper (PERI PERI pepper), potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate (preservatives), dehydrated parsley, lactic acid, calcium-EDTA, turmeric (color), dehydrated bay leaf, mustard, paprika

More so than most products we review, there’s a lot of very chemical-sounding names and additives to make the sauce shelf-stable. While we don’t particularly like that, those are in the minority in terms of the other stuff in the sauce. One thing that David mentioned to us in talking about the Nando’s sauces in general was that they were working on “cleaning them up” to make them more natural and able to be carried in such markets as Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and the like. Until they do that, the additives are really one of the few downchecks we have for any of the Nando’s products in general.

David (right) and his crew show off some of their products
Deciding what to make was actually fairly simple. We had used the previous Nando’s cooking sauce to do grilled chicken, so we kept that plan in place to see how Lemon Peri-Peri chicken would turn out on our own grill.

Linda made some slits and holes in some boneless chicken breasts and then covered them with the lemon cooking sauce. Seen above, this is what we let sit our refrigerator for an entire afternoon as the flavor was allowed to seep in to the meat. Next step was to the grill.

This was actually the last meal we cooked on our old grill, so we were glad to make it something good. Letting the grill be thoroughly heated, we gently laid the chicken breasts on there and let them cook until done, which was about 15-20 minutes on medium-high heat.

This is the look just as they came off the grill. The sauce cooked up nicely, and the sugar content was obviously low enough to keep the sauce from charring on the meat during cooking.

Ah, now this is good stuff. Cutting into the meat, you can see that it’s perfectly cooked. The taste? Wonderful, as you might imagine. A very lemony taste that’s not too tart, and has just a hint of peppery spice to it. Definitely mild, but that was to be expected. This had flavor in abundance.

This was our dinner plate in total…the lemon peri-peri chicken, some savory rice, and some citrus veggies with a touch of the Lemon cooking sauce as well. Light and refreshing, we thought this sauce performed rather admirably. Definitely one of those sauces you can introduce to milder palates who value flavor over heat.

We had about 1/3 of the jar left over after this meal, so we used it to make a version of the Lemon Peri-Peri Rice Salad which was listed on the Nando’s website. While we didn’t exactly make the recipe as listed, the results were what mattered. It was a fresh, lemon-enhanced side dish made very tasty by the addition of this sauce. A definite thumbs-up.

You can see more recipes using this sauce by going to the recipes section on the Nando’s website by clicking HERE.

Overall recommendation: This sauce isn’t terribly hot & spicy, but it certainly has the flavor that’s sure to please. Light and very lemony, you should love this sauce with chicken or whatever you choose to cook with it. There’s so much more that you can do with this sauce, and we just scratched the surface with the utility of this as a cooking sauce. Nando’s sure makes some good cooking sauces, and you may like this one a bunch. Spice it up if you have to have it spicy, but we liked it as-is. Get some and try for yourself. Enjoy!

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» Extra Hot Peri-Peri Sauce by Nando’s
» ‘Grindable’ hot sauce
» Nando’s Hot Peri-Peri Marinade
» Roasted Reds Cooking Sauce with Peri-Peri by Nando’s
» Nando’s foothold in the U.S.A.

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