We’re always on the lookout for good cooking sauces, particularly ones that fit our yen for hot & spicy foods. When they’re not too terribly hot, they should at least be spicy in the sense of the flavor. This product, the Roasted Reds Cooking Sauce with Peri-Peri, is just such a sauce.

This particular sauce was one that I originally tried at the Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire show this past August, where I got to meet some of the guys from Nando’s. David Rock, Luis, and the crew were there with a big booth and all their products. That trip spawned our last review of a Nando’s cooking sauce, the Lemon Peri-Peri Cooking Sauce, which was fan-freaking-tastic with chicken on the grill. However, we wanted to try something a little different with this sauce just to broaden our culinary horizons.

As for the sauce itself, it’s a beautiful deep red sauce that has the overwhelming aroma of red bell peppers and tomatoes. Here’s the description of the sauce from the Nando’s website:

Roasted Red Peppers – A Mediterranean inspired cooking sauce with roasted sweet red peppers & tomatoes blended with balsamic vinegar & a hint of Peri-Peri.

Ingredients: water, onions, tomato paste, sunflower oil, sugar, dehydrated red bell peppers, white vinegar, salt, balsamic vinegar, garlic, onion powder, modified corn starch, lactic acid, black pepper, garlic powder, natural flavor (roasted red bell pepper), artificial flavor (fried onion), African Birds Eye Pepper (PERI PERI pepper), xanthan gum, potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate (preservatives), cayenne pepper, propylene glycol alginate, dehydrated basil, calcium-EDTA

We’ve talked about the ingredients before, including about the preservatives added for shelf-stability. We’re looking forward to asking the Nando’s folks about their latest efforts to clean those up a little. We’ve seen a few of their products recently at out local Whole Foods store, so we hope that we’ll see this one their as well with a more natural reformulation.

For our cooking experiment, we really wanted to try another kind of meat besides chicken. Yes, Nando’s goes great with chicken…but we wanted to “cluck” outside the box for this sauce. We had recently had some coffee-rubbed skirt steak from a recent trip to Whole Foods and like the taste of that cut of meat (low in fat, too), so we decided to go with that for this meal.

Preparation was pretty darn simple. Take one thin steak, flatten in an appropriately-sized cooking dish, then coat both sides with the Roasted Reds cooking sauce, leaving a little extra coating over the top. Wrap the dish in plastic wrap and allow to sit in the fridge overnight, which we did. Our steak looked like this:

Cooking couldn’t have been easier, although admittedly our experience cooking skirt steak has been pretty sparse. About 20-25 minutes in the oven at 350 degrees did the trick. Taking out our steak, we cut it and got it ready for the dinner table. Here’s the finished product:

As for taste, it was quite a hit with us. It was mellow, rich, and with the full-on taste of roasted peppers. The heat is fairly mild (about 3/10 or so), but there’s just enough heat to give your tongue a little tingle when you try it. A little bit of mouth feel of the Balsamic, but with all the taste and little of the tartness you would expect. Nice flavor blend with the garlic and spices as well, which was a great combination of tastes with our steak. The sauce cooked nice & thick, which we also liked as well.

We thought this sauce would be great used with pasta dishes, owing to its Italian-like composition. Perhaps something like grilled chicken and fettuccine, where this sauce would be a healthier choice than something like an alfredo sauce. This sauce would be perfect on virtually any meat, from red to fish to fowl.

Overall recommendation: If you like the taste of roasted red peppers, you will simply adore this sauce. Mildly spicy and full of flavor, this sauce has appeal to a wide audience of different palates. All the Nando’s cooking sauces have been really good, but this one is even better than most and we’d gladly use it again for just about any dinner that would compliment the flavor. With just a little heat along with the roasted pepper flavor, we give this sauce a hearty thumbs-up. Try it for yourself and see what you think. Enjoy!

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