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.

This is my first posting here at the Cook’s Kitchen, so please humor me until I get myself oriented here to my new audience!

Slowly but surely, we’ve been working our way through all the goodies we brought home from our big ol’ trip to ZestFest 2006. This BBQ sauce/marinade by Goleta, Inc. was one of the tasty BBQ treats we tried there. It was a tasty marinade, at least as far as we could tell from a two-ounce sample that we chugged to give this sauce a try. BBQ sauces perform best with cooking. so we knew that this sauce could only show off its tasty, spicy schwerve after being used in our kitchen.

An excuse for us to make spicy BBQ ribs? No arm-twisting needed! A look at the ingredients list reveals this:

Ingredients: sour orange juice, tomato paste, corn syrup, vinegar, brown sugar, garlic, habanero peppers, and natural spices

A good sign is that all the ingredients appear to be pretty natural, without preservatives or artificial colors and flavors. We’re not a big fan of corn syrup, but at least it’s not the high fructose corn syrup which is slowly poisoning many of the foods we like. We’ve not seen too many spicy sauces made with sour orange juice, so we were curious to see if that sourness would translate to our ribs.

Our last BBQ rib recipe used boneless beef ribs, so we wanted to try something different this time around. A trip to our local grocer produced about three pounds of baby back ribs, which had the potential to be a little better than the beef ribs….but how to make them? Admittedly, we’re BBQ rib novices needing a lot of work to get better at making them. We scoured the web looking for some recipe ideas, trying to find one that would yield tender ribs like we’ve had when we have enjoyed them the most.

Most of the recipes we found suggested that the ribs be boiled before oven-roasting them, so that they would be more tender. What is seen above is what the ribs looked like after boiling them for 30 minutes on our stove. The ribs were laid out on our cooking dish to await their coating with BBQ marinade.

Here is our marinade on the ribs. We can say marinade rather than sauce, because there is a thinness to this concoction more akin to a marinade rather than BBQ sauces, which tend to be a little thicker. The instructions on the bottle suggest that the ribs sit overnight in the marinade, but we didn’t have that much advance preparation for these. So, we let them sit in the marinade for an entire afternoon of football-watching before we cooked ‘em up.

This is what the ribs looked like after oven-roasting. These were cooked at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, then broiled at 450 degrees for 15 minutes to really brown them up like BBQ should look. We did re-apply some of the marinade every 5 minutes during the broiling, and it really helped add an extra element of cling to the BBQ coating on the ribs.

Taste: From oven to plate, here’s the final product. Nice BBQ flavor without the sickeningly-sweet taste that so many BBQ marinades can provide. Nicely blended and with a mild amount of heat (perhaps 5/10 on the heat scale), these ribs were indeed tasty. What we can say was that these were not the best baby back ribs we’ve ever tried, but part of that was the ribs themselves. These ribs were just plain fatty, and lacked the amount of meat we are accustomed to having on our baby back ribs. That said, these were decent. Not great, but decent. This marinade saved these from being merely mediocre.

Overall recommendation: Looking for a spicy BBQ that won’t overwhelm your heat sensors and taste pretty good, then Mr. Mojo’s Hot marinade might be one worth giving a try. With its mild heat, it’s a pretty accessible mix of heat and flavor for your BBQ palate. However, the folks at Goleta don’t have a website where you can order this marinade…only a phone number. It does make for good BBQ, just make sure you choose a better choice of ribs than we used. Slightly sweet without too much vinegar taste, this marinade might have benefited from more time to let it soak in to the meat. Give it a try for yourself and see what you think. Enjoy!