Delivering Hot Sauce and BBQ Reviews to the World
Our final review for our Week of Mild series features Cin Chili & Company’s Serrano Hot Sauce. You’ll want to have this sauce on hand for any upcoming football gatherings as it is perfect doused over your favorite bowl of chili. Just perfect. It is now our go-to hot sauce for chili – we buy it by the case.
Cin Chili Serrano Hot Sauce
We can’t have a Week of Mild series without including a good salsa. Our review of Gunther’s Gourmet Jalapeño Salsa Fresca just fits the bill. Brothers Nick and Michael Lampros of Gunther’s Gourmet have amassed quite a line up of salsas, marinades, and vinaigrettes. We think their Jalapeño Salsa Fresca is a fine example of a mild salsa with flavor and heat. This salsa is one of the best jarred salsas we’ve had this year.
Ingredients: diced tomatoes, diced onions, tomato paste (vine ripe tomatoes), jalapeño peppers, lime juice, lemon juice, fresh garlic, salt, sugar, spices and herbs
Texture & Appearance: This chunky salsa has large pieces of tomatoes, onions and peppers. It’s not pureed to death like some jarred salsas. With it’s bright red color, and big texture, you can see and feel what you are eating.
Condiments rule (after hot sauces, of course), and today for Day 5 of Week of Mild, we’re looking at Dillapeño Salsa & Relish from the Smither Family Kitchen in Texas. This concoction of cucumber, jalapeños, sugar and carrots makes for a delicious condiment. Sweet and only mildly hot via the jalapeños, it’s perfect on “cream cheese, deviled eggs, hot dogs, burgers, tuna salad… and our favorite, chips!” according to their label.
Ingredients: cucumber (distilled vinegar, salt, alum, turmeric, spics, 1/10 of 1% sodium benzoate (preservative), polysorbate 80), jalapeño peppers, (water, vinegar, salt), sugar, trace of calcium chloride, carrots
Texture & Appearance: It’s chunky in a relish kind of way. Ok, let’s cut to the chase – it IS a relish. A very sweet relish, with jalapeños.
A mild rub is our featured review for Day 4 of Week of Mild – Oakridge BBQ Secret Weapon Pork & Chicken Rub.
Michael Trump is the owner of Oakridge BBQ out of Kearney, Missouri. Not only do they have an array of spice rubs that are second to none, they are a Barbecue Competition team that have won over 20+ plus awards. Michael Trump and Oakridge know what they are doing.
Oakridge BBQ Secret Weapon bag and sample
Mild BBQ sauce is our entry for Day 3 of our Week of Mild, and this time it’s an Eastern North Carolina style sauce from Carolina Sunshine. It’s a stretch to call any strong vinegar based sauce “mild”, but I’m willing to include one here for variety’s sake. That and the fact that I just realized these potent vinegar based sauces have quite a kick to them, but they are “mild” in terms of heat.
Carolina Sunshine BBQ sauce – hot on the left, original on the right
North Carolina boasts two main styles of BBQ sauce – Piedmont (Lexington) Style, typically made of vinegar, salt, peppers, spices, and ketchup (and sometimes worchestershire sauce) – and Eastern Style, again based on vinegar, but no ketchup. Unlike all other regional BBQ sauces (except for the mustard based goodness out of Alabama), there is NO ketchup in Eastern North Carolina style. This fact alone has always kept me from really enjoying this style of sauce. Until now.