Like so many products that were sent to us during the last couple of months of my residency, these languished for far too long on the shelf before I was in the right frame of mind to try them out. Cheater 5 Surfin’ Salsa Company is a company located in southern California which has been cooking up some great sauces and salsa since 2005. Winners of a few Scovie awards, these products feature some quality (i.e. natural) ingredients which made us even more eager to see how well we liked them. Joe did most of the tasting, but here is our take on these products:

Cheater 5 Shreddin Serrano Salsa: roasted tomatillos, tomatillos, onion, serrano chiles, habanero chiles, roasted garlic, cilantro, dried chiles, water, salt, lime juice concentrate, xanthan gum, citric acid

Cheater 5 Totally Tubular Salsa Taqueria: tomatillo, filtered water, tomato sauce, assorted chiles and peppers, salt, minced garlic, corn oil, and xanthan gum

Cheater 5 Killer Caribbean Hot Sauce: papaya, water, mango, banana, habanero chiles, lime juice concentrate, dried chiles, potassium sorbate (to preserve freshness), sodium benzoate (to preserve freshness), spices

Cheater 5 Shreddin Serrano Salsa: Honestly, this may be one of the most unique salsas we have ever tasted. Keep in mind that there are a finite number of ingredients (and combinations of ingredients) that you can reasonably put into a salsa, but Cheater 5 managed to create an amazing combination that is heavy with tomatillo and serrano, but features enough habanero heat to satisfy the average serious chilehead. Despite not having any extra added sweetness, this salsa has a natural sweetness which must come from the tomatillos…which is an ingredient we feel is not used enough in making salsas. This salsa is very thin, much like a traditional Mexican salsa, but with a new-age sorta taste to it. The heat is tangible but not overwhelming…perhaps 6/10 to us when we used it. However, it was the flavor rather than the heat that kept us tapping into this jar.

Don’t just save this salsa for chip & dip use! Like their website describes, this salsa is simply da bomb in Mexican food and in egg dishes. If you can imagine a culinary use for salsa, we’re willing to bet this salsa would be good with it.

Bottom line: This salsa is the star of their current lineup, and we would make it a regular item in our household if available locally.

Cheater 5 Totally Tubular Salsa Taquera: It’s tough to make a noteworthy taco sauce, since many are either too vinegar-laden or too strong-tasting so that they overwhelm the taste of your taco. Cheater 5 manages to avoid those pitfalls, but somehow this sauce is still just didn’t knock us dead. We really want to say glowing things about this sauce because it is blissfully free of any preservatives or anything of the like, but the sauce has a rather mundane flavor profile. In fact, it seems to lack a bit of “bite” to it which we thought might be due to needing a touch more salt or other spice. Heat-wise, it won’t put a hurting on your tongue…perhaps 3/10 to us.

Despite our caveats we mentioned above, we still manage to find ways to use it. Not because of lacking creativity, it is still one of our first choices currently for tacos, both fish and beef. For everything else, your mileage may vary.

The bottom line: An average taco sauce with above-average ingredient quality. Still a better choice than almost anything you could get at your local supermarket.

Cheater 5 Killer Caribbean Hot Sauce: Believe it or not, the biggest thing we noticed with this sauce was the curious usage of preservatives when the other products avoided them. What’s up with that? This sauce has an amazing aroma to it, where you can really appreciate the mixture of peppers and fruit. However, the mixture has a bit of an incongruent taste profile. Either the sauce separates a little on standing or the mixture is not as well-balanced as we had suspected, because the taste is merely average at best. Neither the fruitiness nor the heat is noteworthy, but the two together are palatable enough. This is definitely the sauce that has the most heat of the Cheater 5 product line thus far, being about 7/10 with enough of it used.

This was a sauce which was of much more benefit poured over food than mixed into any combination, as the complexities of the taste got easily lost in soups, stews, and other sauces. Where it worked best for us was with chicken or fish, particularly ones off the grill or broiler and simply slathered over the meat. The sauce even benefits a little in terms of mellowing from cooking, so if you can stand the heat enough to use enough of it like a sort of marinade, then definitely try that.

The bottom line: Another average hot sauce, this one with a spicy-fruity kick to it. It doesn’t have the widest array of uses when we used, but the dishes it complemented well were definitely noteworthy. Definitely worth your effort to try this sauce.