Salsa Mina Roja Sauce Review

Salsa Mina Roja Sauce

I hesitate to call this a "hot" sauce because it isn't especially, in any kind of proper sense. Rather, it is a curious blend of a fairly heavy tomatillo sauce crossed with a Mexican table sauce. It is very, very heavy on the tomatillos, which gives it an excellent thickness and the fire-roasting really adds an element that is unfortunately a bit too subtle. It is, however, somewhat of a sauce that doesn't know what it wants to be.

To be pushed as a "medium-hot" salsa, there has to be some heat presence. While this has a freshness that makes it frequently distracting and despite jalapenos being listed as the second ingredient, there is no real heat here. In fact, this sauce by itself, I frankly consider largely unusable. With that thickness and texture, this could easily be used as a dipping sauce, but the taste registers as largely incomplete or unfinished.

Enter the saving grace of using this in conjunction with the Salsa Mina Hot Sauce. Those sort of blunting and dulling aspects of this sauce do a nice job of tempering down that obnoxious vinegar hammer in the other sauce while the slight heat of that one rounds this out nice and makes it a pleasant sauce to enjoy in abundance. Getting the ratio down does take some practice, though, but at $1.80 bottle for this and the other, you're talking about approximately $4 for about 18 oz. of sauce, so there's lots of room to practice. Unfortunately, because this sauce (and the other) require companion sauces to make them palatable, the respective scores will be cut down accordingly.

Bottom line: As with all sauces, this one is rated by itself as a standalone. On that basis, it's not a sauce I would consider every buying again. Together, the aggregate score for both this and the Hot Sauce winds up being a 4, which is more or less on the money. I'd even be inclined to nudge it to a 5, but having to go through that kind of work must necessarily be taken into account also.

Breakdown:

      Heat level: 0
      Flavor: 2
      Flexibility: 2
      Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1

Overall: 1