Hot Sauce Test

Filed under Food + Drink Reviews

Ever since I started commuting to Connecticut for work, I started doing my grocery shopping at the Grand Central Market in Grand Central Terminal. I’m usually in and out, picking fresh produce for what I’m planning to cook for dinner, but one day I spent a leisurely time inside investigating the other specialty products the different purveyors sell. One thing that jumped at me was the number of hot sauces for sale. They caught my eye because they came in unique packaging and different shades of reds and oranges. With the help of Grand Central Market’s public relations firm, I was able to sample different hot sauces and compare them with what I already had at home.

Check these from left to right and buy your favorite just in time for the Super Bowl:

1. Ass Blaster hot sauce from Southwest Specialty Food
This came in the most amusing packaging. The bottle is inside a replica of the actual outhouse at the company’s Arizona headquarters. It reminded me of a coffin so tasting it actually made me nervous. The Ass Blaster is fierce on the front of your tongue and it stays there for a long time while you’re eating. I’m sure it would blast my aSs if I have plenty of it.

2. Chimay Salsa Habañero
I like Tabasco sauces because of their vinegary taste. This is a little smokier than the yellow kind I already have and love so even though it’s stingy, the spiciness is short-lived and very tolerable.

3. Kaiska bulls habañero in tequila sauce
This is very interesting because it’s chunky and comes with onions. Despite the name, it has no alcohol in it even though it comes from the agave azul plant, the base ingredient for tequila. I use Kaiska as a condiment because there’s a little bit of sweetness to it that’s great as a rice topper.

4. Mazi Piri Piri sauce
Most commonly known as sauce from Portugal, the chiles are actually used a lot in East African stews and is great as marinade. Piri piris, meaning “very yellow” in Gujarati (after the Portuguese colonies in India), look a lot like Thai chili peppers–small in size but very powerful in heat. It’s also very oily. I noticed that when setting up the photo below: its “legs” are longer on the plate. The packaging is quite a bitch to open because it’s sealed with wax. I had to use a bottle stopper to store it but if you use it as a marinade, you’d probably end up using all of it at once anyway.

5. Valentina hot sauce
I associate Valentina hot sauce with tacos especially here in East Harlem. It’s easily the condiment that’s always present on eat-in counters in taquerias. I once sent my friend Anna a bottle of this straight from Mexico City but didn’t pack it well enough that she basically received a glob of hot sauce on her doorstep. This is probably the most tolerable hot sauce for me in this batch because I’ve had enough of it.

6. Louisiana jalapeño hot sauce
This is also very tangy, though not as spiky as the Chimay. The heat goes in the back of your tongue which may seem nothing at first but begins to kick while you’re chewing your food. The good thing about Louisiana is that it never overpowers the food you’re eating.

7. Cholula chipotle sauce
Chipotle is a dried jalapeño pepper that’s also been smoked. It’s mostly used in Tex-Mex cuisines. Though that’s not at the top of my Mexican food list, I like using Cholula when I make Subanik, a Guatemalan stew I learned to make from Francis Ford Coppola’s resort, to mix with the ancho chiles.

Note that on the photo above, the third and fourth dollop have actually been switched. The chunkier and darker one is from Kaiska; the more orange is piri piri. You can buy #1, #4, #7 from Grand Central Market. My friend Corey brought back #2, #3 and #5 from his last business trip to Mexico, though #5 is available in bodegas in most neighborhoods with a large Mexican population. I bought #6 from the New Orleans School of Cooking.

Related post/s:
Check out the Grand Central Market in Grand Central Terminal
Call the New Orleans School of Cooking and they can ship a box of their best hot sauces anywhere in the United States
This Guatemalan stew brings back memories

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Tassimo Home Brewing System

Filed under Food + Drink Reviews

Imagine my delight when I saw a big box on my chair after being out of the office for two weeks. My co-workers gathered around to watch me unpack the Tassimo Home Brewing System from Kraft Foods. I had the public relations agency specifically send me a sample to test at work where coffee connoisseur wannabes can help me evaluate the cute little machine made by Bosch. We already have a Keurig machine set up in the kitchen, so we set the Tassimo up in one of the designers’ cubicle to schedule coffee breaks and tea times during our regular work hours.

The Tassimo was easy to set up. After following the instructions to clean, we started to make our coffees and teas. Throughout the first day of testing, co-workers came up to make their own cups. The following are the pros from several testers:

1. I like that it has a sensor to stop brewing if you move the cup.
2. Convenient. I don’t have to drive to get my coffee in the middle of the day. (We are, after all, testing in a Connecticut office.)
3. Easy clean-up.
4. Making coffee is quicker than going downstairs to the cafeteria!

But for such a compact machine, the Tassimo is pretty loud. It did help with advertising it to the rest of the office because a few of them stopped by to check out the whirring noise that was coming out of the cubicle. The button that starts the quick brewing process looks like a dial, so all the testers kept trying to turn it to skip a step ahead, i.e., to add more water. The designers asked why the buttons couldn’t be separated and labeled clearly.

We were also sent several samples of the beverages: Starbucks, Espresso, milk for latte and cappuccino and Chai. Each came in small pods with a barcode. The Tassimo reads the barcode and magically knows what to do with it. We all loved that when you put the milk pod, it knows to make it frothy for cappuccino, but some worried if they have to waste and throw a pod if the machine deems it unreadable for one reason or another.

For the Starbucks fans in the office, they thought the coffee brewed up nice and strong. For deli coffee fans, they had to re-brew just to add more water to it because it was too black. A couple of people didn’t like the idea that the milk came in the pods. Although convenient, they didn’t like that they could be sitting on a shelf for a long time. For those who like their coffee with only a little milk, they wanted a button to stop the machine from processing the entire milk pod. But what to do with the leftover milk? They deemed a pod a waste if only one user can process the milk at a time.

On Amazon.com, a box of twelve pods is retailing for $21 which means a cup of coffee is less than $2, but there was a also big concern about the waste of plastic that the pods use even if you use your own mug to brew your coffee.

Overall, the Tassimo Home Brewing System is affordable, compact and convenient, but it could use some design tweaks to make it easier for people to operate without having to pour over the manual. You, as the coffee drinker, should just decide whether you like the taste of the coffee and tea it brews.

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