Given a chance to taste and review a product from one of our favorite companies, My Favorite New Mexico Foods, we jumped right at it. One of the great things about attending this past Weekend of Fire show at Jungle Jim’s was the opportunity to pick up a variety of their products…in bulk. Even though this sauce, the 4 Chile Bar-B-Querque Sauce, isn’t as much-awarded as some of their other sauces, we knew from our sampling of it at the show that it was likely going to be a big hit at our house.

The fact is, we’ve been on a bit of a BBQ kick here lately. A lot of grilled BBQ chicken along with the occasional hamburger or other red meat has made for some good taste-testing with the variety of BBQ sauces that we have. We planned our usual grilled boneless, skinless chicken breasts on our grill, plus a few other tasty options before putting our thoughts to paper…er, computer screen. The description of this sauce from the website goes like this:

Beef is wonderful when cooked with, or dipped in this unique sauce, that is bursting with the flavor of Jalapenos, Ancho chiles, Chipotle, and Chimayo chile. This sauce will spice up your burgers, ribs, steaks, and briskets.

Hey, all that sounded pretty good to us! The combination of three fairly earthy, great flavor chiles seemed like a good idea even before we tried it. Scanning the ingredients list, we saw:

Ingredients: catsup, onions, fresh jalapenos, coffee, worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, dijon mustard, vegetable oil, ancho chile powder, chipotle chile powder, chimayo chile powder, garlic, kosher salt

It seems to have quite a miscellany of tastes and combinations. Some of the “usual suspects” like vinegar, catsup, and brown sugar meet up with some alternative sorts of things like coffee and dijon mustard. I think we would have preferred to see fresh chiles as opposed to the chile powders, but we would wait to see how it turned out before we made that assertion. Trying any BBQ sauce made with coffee was going to be an interesting experience no matter what.

First impression: Very much on the thin side of the spectrum, this sauce pours easily from the bottle. Great chile aroma that is very enticing, and not too heavy with vinegar. Small chunks of pepper are visible when the sauce is poured out over food.

Taste: Obviously, not many people eat BBQ sauce straight out of the jar…but you could almost get away with it with this sauce! Both a little sweet and a little spicy, it has a taste unlike a majority of BBQ sauces you’ll find. The heat really is staunchly mild-to-medium, perhaps no more than 5/10 on our personal heat scale, and is manageable by even the meeker palates. We initially thought the pepper chunks might be green chile due to their taste, but realized that it was actually jalapeno instead.

As you can see in the above picture, this sauce makes for a pretty amazing BBQ chicken on the grill. Grilling seemed to mellow the sweetness just enough so that you really appreciate the chile flavor that much more. On hamburgers, it trumps even ketchup (which it has a little bit of anyway) as our condiment of choice. For the kids, we roasted some plain ol’ hot dogs and added them, sliced up, to some warm sauce and it was an instant hit with our younger child who made yummy noises as he ate.

Overall recommendation: Definitely a pleasant change from a majority of the BBQ sauces out there, MFNM Foods brings you a great sauce…New Mexico style! Well-blended and with a great recipe, it has an outstanding flavor with enough heat to at least get your attention but not obliterate your taste buds. Our uses only scratched the surface on the variety of foods this sauce would compliment, but we found it pretty useful for BBQ of any variety. We’ll award this BBQ sauce an award all its own, and that’s our glowing endorsement that you should try it. Enjoy!

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI