My Favorite New Mexico Foods Red Chile Sauce
When we think back to our time at ZestFest, we really rue the fact that we weren’t able to spend time with everyone we wanted to see. Such is the case with the fine folks at My Favorite New Mexico Foods. These fine ladies had a neat-looking booth which always seemed to be packed with people in line to try their stuff. We weren’t able to catch them during the Trade Day to do a ‘formal’ interview, so we just had to eat, chat, and run.
But, oh, what a good taste it was!
We weren’t always into eating chile sauce like this. We took a trip out to Albuquerque in 2001 to attend the National Fiery Foods & BBQ Show and visit Joe’s older brother (who lived there at the time), and he took us out to eat at a restaurant called Garduño’s. We were introduced to their gourmet chile bowls featuring both red and green chile and the rest, as they say, is history. Being the Midwesterners that we are, it’s nearly impossible to get anything that resembles the quality of Hatch chiles (or dishes made with them) where we live. Garduño’s is a regional chain only, so we knew that we weren’t going to be able to find that sorta thing while going out to dinner here either, even at Tex-Mex restaurants. We had sadly consigned ourselves to the fact we’d just have to relish our chile dishes on our all-too-seldom trips out West.
Well thanks to My Favorite New Mexico Foods, we can have those great chile dishes whenever we want it. On our bottle of Red Chile Sauce, we saw this list of ingredients:
Ingredients: water, New Mexico red chile, unbleached flour, granulated garlic, salt, granulated onion, spices, phosphoric acid (all-natural)
Essentially, it’s mostly red chile and a few spices…all of which are completely natural. It’s simplicity at its finest. We really wanted to do something special with our sauce of this sauce, but our own fixins at home were pretty limited. We had some unused skirt steak in our freezer, so that became the base to the dish that the red chile sauce would enhance. We browned the meat up quickly, added the red chile sauce, and let it simmer for a little while. Below you can see what it looked like as it cooked on our stove:
We let this simmer for about 20 minutes, then ladled out a bowl for each of us. One taste made us immediately regret not having more jars of this sauce.
Taste: Despite the simplicity of the ingredients list, the finished product is a sauce that is quite rich and complex. An alluring pungency and hint of smokiness that can only be described as New Mexican red chile, it has a flavor like no other pepper. Its heat is truly medium, perhaps 5/10, and with just enough warmth to give your tummy a warm glow. One of the strengths of this sauce is that its flavor it amazing as-is, so you don’t even have to doctor it up to make it taste any better. The onion and garlic are slightly noticeable, and enhance the flavor without detracting from the overall flavor profile. It’s a little thin as it pours from the jar, but does thicken a little bit with cooking. The only thing it lacks is chunks of red chile itself, but the taste is so good you won’t complain.
Overall recommendation: In a world chock full of hot sauce and salsa, chile sauces stand out as a pleasant change of pace. How quickly we use something up is often a sign of how well we could recommend a product, and this sauce disappeared in an instant. Not only that, but it’s pretty healthy as well. Low in calories and fat, plus the fact that an entire jar contains a mere 32 g of carbs. Whether you make something simple like we did or something more challenging like huevos rancheros, your yen for fresh-tasting chile sauce will be fulfilled by this product. Not just that, but it is surprisingly addictive…which is why we’ll be ordering another case of this sauce really soon. If there’s such as thing as a can’t-miss product, this is it.
