Elizabeth at YesChilli, a new business to us here at ChileFoundry HQ sent us in a bottle of her Pepper and Ginger sauce to review. This sauce has one of the shortest list of ingredients I have seen in the past few years, but I suspect that peppers covers a lot more and it says.
The label may also give away a little more of that is to come, just below the words “Hot Sauce” it says “Pan roasted sun dried dark Pepper and Ginger in oil”. Well on opening the bottle there is a nice smell of sunflower oil with more that just hints of the pepper and ginger, it is a cold morning at ChileFoundry HQ and I think this sauce need to be warmed up a bit to release the aromas so it off to the kitchen for a bit of a play.
A quick spoonful before I start and wow the flavours come flooding out, it is hot and warming, but not in the extreme sense, it a heat that starts a little cough, mostly in surprise at the how will it heats me up, Capsaicin the active ingredient in chillies is an oil so this sunflower oil spreads it quickly around my mouth.
Ingredients: Sunflower oil, Pepper, Ginger and Soya extract.
Bottle kindly supplied by YesChilli
I then warmed a little in a pan, as it gets hotter the aromas start to come to though, but still not as much as I now expected, not to waste this oil in the pan, a little lightly fired egg on toast goes down very well, I can see I need a drizzle top for this bottle, this would work well on Huevos Rancheros (fired eggs on a toasted corn tortilla with avocado and some refried beans)
Next I tried adding a few spoonfuls, OK a good glug into an almost instant Mayo recipe I have been using for the last few years, now this stuff is coming alive, the colour of the mayo is slightly darker, but the flavours from the ginger and chillies transforms this into a gourmet mayo.
This is a much more interesting product than the initial smell led me to think, this bottle won’t last long, I already have plans for a drizzle on my omelet later, and maybe marinading some pork chops
It is hard to come up with a description of this sauce, it is not a oil with a chilli in it, it is much more than that, it is not a blended up chillies chilli sauce, it is not just an ingredient. This was a great surprise an almost unique product (its does bring to mind, David’s Chilli Oils and Germano’s Chilli Sauce as they are both oil based, but the flavour are all completely different. The YesChilli product is very simple with just Ginger and Chilli but the balance between them just seems to work.
The only down side is in terms of presentation, the bottle we have does not do this product justice, I think you should always fill the bottle to the neck, otherwise it looks like some may have leaked in transit. I would also not send out bottle where the cap security cover is so twisted, as that product photograph is going to be seen by 1000’s of potential buyers in the next few months and once on the web it is there for life.
Having had a very minor gripe, the label is good and bright and that combined with the interesting bottle shape makes this very eye catching, so just top up the bottles and sort the capping process and this sauce will not just taste great it will also look the business.
If you visit the YesChilli web site you can find a list of local suppliers and also make a purchase via eBay, at £3.99 + £2.80 delivery (reduced since review) this product now represents excellent value for money.
| Flavour |
   (8.5/10) |
| Heat |
(5/10) |
| Packaging |
(8/10) |
| Value | (8/10) |
| Overall |
(8.5/10) |