" Some varieties of birdseye measure up to 175,000 Scoville Heat Units."
The Key points are 'extremely spicy', 'up to 175 000 Scoville units' and, well, the history. I was first introduced to the concept of African Birdseye chili by Ricky, who saw it used in Zambia for medical purposes. We discussed the possibility of making a hot sauce from it, but I was unable to acquire it for us to make. Flash forward more than a year later, and PC seems to have found their own version for us to try.
Earlier this summer I sampled PC's Piri-Piri deli chicken and it had a lot of flavour and a bit of bite for a sandwich meat. So, after seeing ads and displays, finally broke down and bought their Memories of Portugal Piri Piri Barbecue sauce and try it out.
The ingredients didn't suggest much heat - the first item was water, followed by olive oil, then vinegars! And there are a LOT of ingredients in it; why is there garlic, dehydrated garlic, and garlic extract? And is 'Natural Colour' and ingredient???
You can kind of get an idea of the texture, colour and appearance of the sauce in the picture above. Its more of a marinade than a regular sauce, so I marinated chicken breast strips for about 24 hours to get the full flavour into the poultry. I did want to try this on wings, but breasts is what I had.
2008 SAUCE SCORE v1.0: PC Memories of
BOTTLE INFO | ||||||||
TYPE: | ‘grilling sauce’, bbq sauce | |||||||
PRICE & BOTTLE SIZE: | 350ml, approx $3 (give or take) | |||||||
SAUCES: | PC has hundreds of memories | |||||||
INGREDIENTS: | Water, olive oil, vinegars (aged red peppers, white vinegar, salt, xanthan gum), garlic, canola oil, salt, lemons, concentrated lemon juice, spices (contain piri piri peppers), modified corn starch, corn syrup, xanthan gum, dehydrated garlic, spice extracts, tomato paste, brown sugar, soy lecithin, potassium sorbate, lemon oil, garlic extract, onion powder, natural colour, calcium disodium edta. | |||||||
CLAIMS/SLOGANS: | “Made with Imported Piri Piri peppers and a blend of herbs and spices, this flavourful grilling sauce will deliver a hot and spicy kick to chicken and shrimp” | |||||||
THE SENSES | ||||||||
APPEARANCE /TEXTURE: | -Runny but opaque -almost creamy | |||||||
SMELL: | -from the bottle, it almost smells like Kraft Caesar salad dressing -is creamy a smell? | |||||||
FLAVOUR: | PRE-COOKING -a slightly spicy Caesar dressing POST-COOKING -marinated chicken has almost no flavour, But a small kick | |||||||
THE PAIN | ||||||||
HEAT: |
| 1/3 | ||||||
BURN CHRONOLOGY: |
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| ||||||
TASTE: | Not that flavourful – wouldn’t use it as a dip, and doesn’t do anything as a marinade | 1/3 | ||||||
FINAL SCORE | 2/6 | |||||||
OTHER: | nope |
I baked the chicken for about 30-40 mins, on a grilling rack. The chicken breast meat was super tender and turned out well. The sauce gave a slight orange/sand colour to the chicken. Biting into it, I couldn't really taste anything but the chicken. There was a faint, kick, no more of a tingle from the chili, but mostly I just tasted chicken. The sauce was really disappointing.This review is a few weeks old, but I tried to make it again. This time, I cut the chicken into much smaller strips, marinated for much longer, and grilled them on a George Foreman Grill. Same result - no strong flavour at all. I still have about 1/3 of the bottle left and I really want to use it to BBQ, because I think the smokey flavour might help . . . but really probably not.
On a side note, I made some Kerala-style wedges, similar to the ones HERE, only with less chili powder, thinking that the chicken would have been spicy enough. It wasn't, and these ended up being the winners of the night.
FINAL SCORE: I guess PC didn't enjoy their trip to Portugal, because the memory of it wasn't very good. It didn't work well as a marinade, you can't really use it for a dipping sauce, so I'm not sure what good this sauce would be. It's not something I really recommend at all, but maybe someone out there has a better idea about how to use it. Piri-Piri may be a very hot chili, but PC wasn't able to translate that to us here in Canada. 2/6
President's Choice Memories of Portugal Piri Piri Barbecue Saucepresidentschoice.ca
The sauce is actually quite good but you need to cook things a bit differently. It is NOT meant to be a marinade. And it really works best on bbq chicken pieces skin on and bone in, but the trick is that you first slow bbq the chicken over medium or medium low heat. You can baste it a few times while cooking but the KEY here is that you must brush it on once with about 5 minutes left in the cooking, and no more turning, and then just as you take it off the bbq (or out of the oven) you brush on a last coat and serve. If you ever go to a churrasqua chicken takeout joint and watch them prepare it, you will see that they put the sauce on right at the end. Generally speaking any of these type of sauces or bbq sauces, you must always apply it just before the cooking is done and sometimes just as you take it off the heat. Then you will taste all kinds of the flavour.
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