This sauce comprises the last of the original four sauces from Hot Sauce Hawaii that I was privileged enough to be offered the chance to review. This sauce, the Hawaiian Passion Habanero Vinaigrette is truly unique, even amongst the other sauces from the same line.

Ingredients: balsamic vinegar, olive oil, habaneros, jalapenos, mustard (water, mustard seed, distilled vinegar, salt, white wine, citric acid, tartaric acid & spices), salt kitchen Bouquet (caramel, carrots, onion, celery, parnsips, turnips, salt, parsley, spices, sodium benzoate & sulfiting agents), spices, garlic

First impression: I adore the graphics on this sauce, with the aboriginal-ish skull with the flames coming out of its mouth. The oil and vinegar do obviously separate a little, which is not what you normally see in a sauce like this. The herbs in this sauce give a bit of a “floral” aroma to this sauce. The thinness of this sauce makes the restrictor cap, which I usually eschew, almost a necessity. Shaking out a few drops at a time seems to work out great.

Taste: Not a typical hot sauce in either taste or consistency, I found that this sauce didn’t just work with everything. The vinegar and olive oil make this taste a bit like an infused salad dressing with chiles in it. I could taste the jalapenos overall but felt a little bit of the habanero heat with each usage. It’s a medium-hot sauce to me, perhaps about a 5.5/10 for heat. More so than most sauces, this one could be adequately described as spice-laden. Between the kitchen bouquet and other spices, it has a myriad of subtleties to its flavor that would go well with a variety of dishes. It was a little liquid-y to be used like most sauces when poured over food, however. I preferred this as a chilehead salad dressing, which is out-freaking-standing as a spicy addition to your favorite salad. As suggested, it is a great sauce to use as a marinade for meat or veggies. We tried it with some thin steak out on our grill, and it was outstanding. The meat was tender and tasty after 2 hours marinading in this sauce.

Hawaiian Passion Habanero Vinaigrette 5oz bottle
Our Habanero Vinaigrette sauce is completely unique — makes a great salad dressing, marinde and more! Wonderful flavor, nice heat, can’t be beat! Created by Hawaii Chef Henry Holthaus. Made in Hawaii! Made with Balsamic Vinegar. Olive Oil, Habanero and a few secret flavors. Makes killer potato salad. Spice up those steaks and ribs. A dipping sauce that will make you say WOW! Get one - Get a bunch. Great graphics. Wonderful gift!

Overall recommendation: This is not your prototypical hot sauce by any stretch. To me, it’s more like a cooking sauce or marinade than a hot sauce as I’m used to it. It is nice and spicy, but with pure spices in addition to some yummy chile peppers. A bit left-of-center, but a sauce out of Hawaii that you can experiment with to your heart’s content. Give it a try and see for yourself. Enjoy!!!

Popularity: 18% [?]

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:
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Popularity: 17% [?]

We here at the Hot Zone Online really like seeing the “little guy” succeed in the hot & spicy food business. Perhaps we need to change that to include the “little lady” as well.

Some time ago, we were contacted by Mia from Borderline Gourmet Barbecue & Spices about trying their products. It seems as though she has a small business that just opened in July of last year making spicy BBQ sauces, which evolved from a recipe that she had been making at home for quite some time. This sauce, the Habanero Sauce and Marinade, is one of the two varieties that Borderline Gourmet currently has to offer. Never being ones to turn down a chance to try a good spicy BBQ sauce, we graciously accepted Mia’s offer.

The bottle itself is a twelve-ouncer with a glossy metallic label. It looks kinda classy and elegant, while maintaining a certain simplicity as well. In fact, the metallic sheen made it a little tough to photograph…but only us food bloggers actually spend time trying to find ways to photograph their food. This sauce has this within it:

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

Not a bad list for the most part, but we were struck by the fact that this sauce has not one, but three, kinds of vinegar in it. The taste would reveal how well that works with this sauce, but it was noteworthy from reading the label. The aroma is blissfully free of a strong vinegary smell, and has an aroma mostly of tomato and liquid smoke. The sauce is quite thin, more so than most BBQ sauces we’ve reviewed, and pours a little too easily from the wide-mouthed bottle.

Taste: The straight taste revealed a strong, vinegar-dominated flavor. In fact, this sauce is downright tart with vinegar…but has spicing which is rich in habanero and balck pepper flavor. Few people eat BBQ sauce straight out of the bottle, so we decided that the best use would be with some BBQ chicken. Our home cooking with BBQ sauce is pretty straightforward, so we decided to keep this simplicity going and use this sauce to make some BBQ chicken breasts in our oven.
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Popularity: 14% [?]

Bull Brothers Pepper Sauce, Mild and Medium Salsa Review

Manufacturer: Bull Brothers (www.bullbrothers.com)

Products:
Bull Brothers Pepper Sauce
Bull Brothers Medium Chunky Salsa
Bull Brothers Mild Salsa

Ingredients (Applicable to all three products):
Hungarian Peppers
Ketchup (Bottle also list ingredients for Ketchup)
Distilled Vinegar
Onions
Mushrooms
Canola Oil
Sugar
Garlic
Garlic Pepper
Salt

Packaging :
The labeling on the Bull Brothers is eye catching. I love the bull with the chili peppers for horns. The basic white label with dark text makes it easy to read.

Packaging Score: 19/20

Aroma:
Upon opening the bottle, a very pleasant aroma of garlic, onion, tomato, and peppers is evident. Not overpowering but just right.

Aroma Score: 19/20

Texture:
The texture is smooth and thick when cold and sticks to a tortilla chip easily. I like a sauce of this texture. The medium chunky salsa is “chunky” as advertised, while the mild salsa has a smoother texture.

Texture Score: 20/20

Taste:
The taste is smooth while creating an instant warm feeling more on the top middle of the palate than the tongue. Nothing jumps out at you as far as ingredients go, all is blended and a perfect mix of ingredients. This hot sauce and chunky salsa has a little bite to it, but it is pleasant. The mild salsa has a good taste and will be great for the novice heat lover.

Taste Score: 20/20

Aftertaste:
Five minutes after tasting, there is a little sweat on my forehead, under my eyes and the edges of my receding hairline. Fifteen minutes after tasting a lingering warm sensation on the palate and corners of the mouth remain.

Aftertaste Score: 20/20

Overall Score: 98/100

Summary:
These are three new items I will keep in my refrigerator from now on. Great pepper sauce and salsas. Highly recommended to all who love good tasting pepper sauce and salsa.

Popularity: 14% [?]

I can assure you I have not flipped my lid. I have not been abducted by alien cows (well, at least not yet) and replaced by a clone. The spider bite has not affected my brain or taste buds. Mark it on your calendars folks, Passow has found a product that is primarily vinegar and he likes it!

Csigi Gourmet Habanero Balsamic Vinaigrette Ingredients: Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Balsamic Vinegar, Garlic, Extra Coarse Sea Salt, Habanero Chilies, Oregano, Spices.

Yes, once again Lars over at Csigi has come out with an amazing, amazing product. A product so overwhelming in it’s taste that I like the use of vinegar! I generally don’t use vinaigrettes because the main ingredient is vinegar but I am completely throwing that rule out the window for this sauce.

The sweet taste of the Balsamic Vinegar hit the taste buds first and then the E.V.O.O. follows it, coating the tongue and spreading the flavor. Next come the fruity flavor of the Habaneros but not the heat of it. After consuming enough of the dressing, you will get a tingle on your lips, but nowhere near most Habanero sauces. This is another reason to like this sauce; almost everyone can enjoy it without having their tongue blown out the back of their head.

The garlic is also very prevalent as a flavor which not only makes this good for regular green salads, but spot on for pasta salads. And we all enjoy pasta don’t we? I do not detect the sea salt, always a bonus in my book, and I also can’t tell what spices he’s used. What ever they were, it’s great. The taste on this sauce is subtle but bold at the same time (mainly due to the balsamic vinegar and garlic).

The only thing that I found as an annoyance was the separation. Because of the use of E.V.O.O. and vinegar, all the ingredients separate extremely fast. I found myself shaking the bottle, pouring out some, mixing the salad a little bit, and coming back to the bottle to find that I have to shake it again because it separated already. But that’s a minor inconvenience. One that I gladly accept to get such a great taste.

Taste: 9.8, Heat: 2.5

Popularity: 22% [?]

We’ve been so looking forward to trying this Fra Diavolo Pasta sauce from Csigi Chili Sauce since trying it a few months ago, but the perfect meal opportunity just hadn’t presented itself. Finally, the stars aligned and we had our idea. If we were going to make an Italian-type dish for dinner, we just had to make it in a chilehead sort of way. Reading the sauce’s description on the Csigi website, it read:

Using a secret family recipe, I’ve added fresh basil, red onions, and fresh orange habanero pods! This sauce is thick, hearty, spicy, and just downright delicious! Try it with your favorite pasta or seafood dish. Makes a fantastic lasagna or baked ziti. Add some as a base to your favorite chili recipe. Cook down some sausage, peppers, and onions with Csigi Gourmet’s Fra Diavolo Pasta Sauce for the best sausage and peppers you’ve tried. Better than what Mom used to make! It’s that bold!

One thing that we love to see in the hot & spicy products we use is that they are made with quality, all-natural products. Lars from Csigi Chilli Sauce has made it clear in previous comments that he feels the same way, so when we saw these ingredients it made us want to use this sauce in large quantities:

Ingredients: tomato puree, organic crushed tomato, red onion, tomato paste, extra virgin olive oil, basil, minced garlic, orange habanero chilies (fresh whole pods), extra coarse sea salt, turbinado sugar, coarse black pepper, spices

Cracking open the jar, you might not think this is all that much different than any other store-bought pasta sauce. However, the similarities start to go away once you examine it a little further. For one thing, the label’s just plain cool. Prego, Classico, and even Paul Newman can’t hold a candle to these products from an artistic standpoint. There’s a hint of chile pepper aroma to this sauce, but honestly it just smells like a really good, spice-laden pasta sauce.
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Popularity: 22% [?]

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.
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Popularity: 26% [?]

If it seems like we never have enough good things to say about the products from My Favorite New Mexico Foods, well…we’re not going to dispute that. Try as we might, everything thus far we have reviewed thus far has been various degrees of excellent. With this product, the Chimayo Citrus & Mustard Bar-B-Querque Finishing Sauce, we continue our experimentation with BBQ-ish sauces from MFNM by giving this sauce a one-and-only culinary test-drive.

Usually, one-shot kitchen wonders are not what we do. We like trying products out in a variety of ways before writing a review on them, but this sauce was so quickly used up that we have to make do with what we had. (Take note, Sharon, this means we’ll need some more. ;)) One thing was for sure, we didn’t know offhand what a “finishing sauce” was…at least not by that terminology. SOme research revealed this definition:

Finishing Sauce: A term commonly applied to mixtures that are served over various foods either as it finishes cooking or for use after it is served.

Well, I guess that means that all BBQ sauces are finishing sauces, but not all finishing sauces are BBQ. We took inspiration for our dish of choice that gave us this idea:

Chicken is another common favorite that can be given a new lift by the presence of a finishing sauce. With baked boneless chicken breasts, try preparing a zesty pepper sauce from scratch or purchasing one of the commercially produced pepper sauces from the supermarket. The sauce can be brushed on about half way through the baking or broiling process, allowing the meat to absorb some of the flavor.

Well, we had some boneless, skinless chicken breasts that we were needing to cook for dinner, so Linda set about the task of making them with this sauce. We did a chicken sauté by simply cooking the chicken breasts in this sauce on medium heat until they were cooked all the way though. When nearly done, the chicken breasts were cut into bite-sized pieces and we added a can of diced tomatoes and some freshly diced onions to the mix and let it simmer, adding water on occasion so that it wouldn’t dry out while cooking. Here’s how it looked in the skillet as the chicken cooked down initially:

A word about the straight flavor…its outstanding. Only MFNM can take such divergent tastes as chile powder, mustard, and orange marmalade and make the combination taste like they were meant to be together. Check out this list:

Ingredients: apple cider vinegar, yellow mustard, orange marmalade, chipotle chile powder, chimayo chile powder, garlic powder, kosher salt, sesame oil, and seasonings

All-natural and delicious right out of the jar. You get a nice tangy flavor from the orange & mustard blend (which is not too heavy on the mustard), followed by the heat and flavor of the blend of chile powders. From the initial sweetness, the first thought was that it wasn’t all too spicy…but a nice, simmering heat follows that builds the more you eat. Perhaps a 5/10 for heat, building to a 6/10, it’s enough to at least get your attention. Back to our entree, however….

After the chicken had simmered in the sauce for another half-hour and the added veggies had softened up, Linda cut the chicken up and made one last mix of the chicken sauté before it was served. Here was dinner, right before we ladled it onto our plates:

The finished product was nothing short of outstanding. Linda’s mother, who eschews spicy food, found herself eating her entire portion and then some. She said, “Yes it’s hot, but the flavor is so good that I don’t really care.” Again, MFNM foods manages to marry heat and flavor in such a way that this sauce has appeal to most palates. The description of the sauce from the bottle recommends:

Chimayo Citrus & Mustard Bar-B-Querque Finishing Sauce (Medium Hot)- This tangy yet spicy sauce is a great compliment to chicken, pork and fish. It features 4 varieties of NM chile favorites (Chipotle, Chimayo, Cayenne, and Red Pepper) as well as mustard and a hint of orange flavor to spice up even the most average dish to make it a hit among family and friends. A local favorite is basting chicken wings or shrimp on the grill with this sauce and then using it as a dipping sauce on them as well.

Our lingering thought was that this sauce takes mundane foods and makes them something special in a very simple, straightforward fashion without having to get too complicated in the preparation. Use it as a dip, a basting sauce, or even as a NM-style condiment that you’ll truly enjoy. This sauce may have less critical acclaim, at this point, than some of the others in the My Favorite New Mexico Foods product line, but you could scarcely go wrong with this sauce in any meal in your kitchen. A hearty, enthusiastic thumbs-up from us. Try some for yourself and find out. Enjoy!

Popularity: 33% [?]

This isn’t exactly a hot sauce review, but when you have a chance to try this one for yourself, you’ll say “Who cares?”

(Author’s note: While the sauce I reviewed is no longer marketed under the name Chocolate Glow, it is now available with the name Chocolate Passion. This will explain the discrepancy between the picture and review title.)

Chocolate and chile peppers seem to go as well together as peanut butter and jelly, when made just right. Making it more or less spicy is a matter of personal preference, but when chocolate is involved it’s hard to really go wrong. I’ve heard some non-chileheads say things like, “How could you ruin perfectly good chocolate by making it spicy?!”

Those people have quite obviously never tried this chocolate sauce. Just have one taste and you’ll have a better understanding. Looking at the sauce’s description from the Peppermaster website:

I have reduced the heat of our burning hot ‘Chili Chocolate’ to that of a gentle, warm glow by extracting the essence of MILDER CHILI PEPPERS, and marrying it to this delightful concoction of Fair Trade certified 70% Callebaut dark chocolate, Tahitian vanilla and Fair Trade certified organic espresso.

It’s difficult to not love this chocolate, it’s got a surprising tingle of heat that enhances ice cream, cheesecake or fresh fruit.

A review of the amazing list of ingredients shows:

Ingredients: sugar, glucose, cream (35%mf), corn syrup, unsweetened chocolate, fresh pepper liquor, butter (salt-free), espresso (spring water, Guatemala dark coffee), pure Tahitian vanilla extract

My goodness, what’s not to like from that list? Unless you’re counting calories, that is. Maybe spicy chocolate sauce has less calories then regular chocolate sauce. In my universe, that’s the way it should be.
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Popularity: 35% [?]

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 » Continue Reading

Popularity: 33% [?]

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