Completing our cooking experimentation with Borderline Gourmet, we cracked open the bottle of Chipotle Sauce & Marinade for our trial run with it. Chipotle barbecue sauces have become quite popular these days (check your local grocery store if you don’t believe me), so I wondered what Mia of Borderline Gourmet could do with the sauce to make it a standout sauce.

For one thing, much I can say about this sauce also applied to the recent review of the Habanero Sauce and Marinade I posted a few days ago. The bottle, label, sauce consistency, and even the aroma is roughly identical to the Habanero sauce. The aroma really smells like a prototypical barbecue sauce, and is thick with the scent of liquid smoke and a sweetness that’s a little like caramelized sugar. The ingredients list looks like this:

Ingredients: water, tomato concentrate (water, tomato paste), corn syrup, vinegar, onions, red wine vinegar, white vinegar, honey, liquid smoke, Worcestershire sauce (white vinegar, molasses, corn syrup, spices, anchovy paste, natural flavor [contains soy], tamarind), chipotle peppers, sugar, brown sugar, mustard, lemon juice, salt, garlic, cumin, soy sauce, jalapeno peppers, chile arbol, black pepper, onion powder, and spices

Pretty much the same as the habanero, save for the addition of a little more sugar and chipotle peppers instead of habanero peppers. My lovely wife Linda is much more the chipotle aficionado than me, so I came up with an idea to cook up a dinner to best utilize this sauce. I didn’t want to duplicate what we did with chicken, so I opted to cook up some tender boneless pork chops with this sauce. Keeping the simplicity theme going, we bought some two inch-thick boneless pork chops which looked pretty much like this:

Preparation is a snap. If frozen, thaw the chops out and arrange in a cooking dish. Make stabs in the chops so that sauce can seep into the middle of the meat as it cooks. Cover the meat with the Chipotle sauce and bake in the oven at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes, then remove and add more sauce to the meat and cook for an additional 10-15 minutes or until cooked to desired level of done-ness. After cooking, you get some delectable looking BBQ pork chops which look a lot like this:

Be careful not to cook pork until it’s over-done, as we’ve made this mistake of doing so in the past…and the meat gets chewy and hard. These turned out perfect! See how juicy these look!

Taste: Yes folks, the taste is nearly as good as it looks. Unlike the habanero sauce, which is a very dominant flavor, the chipotle sauce is a much more earthy, subtle, gently-sweet flavor. It’s much more like a traditional BBQ sauce in mouth-feel, and is smoky and sweet. In fact, the chipotle flavor is so subtle that it made me wish for some more chipotles in the sauce. Heat-wise, it’s not going to set anyone’s mouth aflame…but you wouldn’t expect that from a chipotle sauce anyway. I would call the heat about 3/10, and that’s even after I had eaten a bit to benefit from whatever buildup of heat you can get from a dish. Fairly mild, even for a spicy BBQ sauce.

This sauce was a good choice for pork, but you could certainly get away with using this for about any meat dish. Linda mentioned that she’d like to use it to make a chipotle meatloaf, where she’d use this sauce like you would mix ketchup into the meat before you bake it in the oven. The thinner consistency of this sauce makes it imperative that you consider that when pairing this sauce to a particular cooking style. Like the habanero sauce, we also felt that this sauce and its vinegar-heavy taste would make a better marinade in some recipes than as a pour-over barbecue sauce.

Overall recommendation: Another solid effort for Borderline Gourmet with this sauce, and it’s milder taste makes it a little more user-friendly for the milder palates amongst us. It’s chipotle flavor is on the subtle side of the spectrum and it’s smoky-sweet like a traditional BBQ sauce. The fun part is figuring out how best to use this sauce. We won’t be able to do so for a while…because our bottle is empty of even a single drop left to try. I guess that’s an endorsement all its own, so try it for yourself and see what you think. Enjoy!

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