Texas Brew Salsa – Honey Roasted Mango Salsa

I’m back with the double-header, and number two in today’s write-up on Texas Brew is their Honey Roasted Mango Salsa.  Now, Mangoes have started becoming quite the leader in the fruit arena or spicy foods, commonly used in salsa crudas, wing sauces, hot sauces, and also salsa, and so it’s a bit less surprising these days to see it.  There is a difference here though, it sounds like this time around, these guys decided they would honey roast these suckers and honestly, that sounds pretty cool to me.  Let’s dive in and see what some honey roasted mango tastes like.

Ingredients:

We’re seeing here again a 3-chile pepper combination, and honestly the large presence of tomato and the hidden habanero in the mix is a bit unsuspected, as I read this as ”Honey + Fruit” salsa, expecting more of a sweet fruit salsa that had some heat.  I wonder if maybe this is going to be a fair bit more spicy than I originally thought.  Here’s the list:  Roasted Tomato, Mango, Mango Puree, Tomato, Water, Lemon Juice from Concentrate, Honey, Roasted Onion, Natural Mango Flavor, Chipotle Peppers, Sugar, Roasted Poblano Pepper, Salt, Habanero Pepper, Roasted Garlic, Molasses, Spices, Vinegar and Xanthan Gum.

Aroma/Color/Texture:

The sauce is fairly thin, and there is the occasional chunk of what appear to be mango and tomato.  The coloring of the sauce is sort of an odd mix, where each time you look at it, you see a light reddish brown that is sometimes imbued with either more red, more orange, or more yellow, seemingly dependent on what angle you look at it.  You definitely pick up the sweet scent of mango and some smokey components, with the chipotle chiles standing out a little more than anticipated.  There is sort of an oddly peanut butter like aroma that you get in the background of it all, which makes no sense, but hey, it’s there.

Taste/Ratings:

FIRE	FLAVOR

No bones here, this is a Mild salsa.  So mild, that I’m almost hesitant to call it salsa.  I’d lump this more in to the chutney category.  There are a lot of variations in the texture once you get some in your mouth.  There is the obvious chunks of mango that add that sweet and the tomato is pretty unnoticeable.  There seems to be a few quirky flavors here, and honestly, while this seems interesting as a salsa idea, it comes across sort of like a semi-sweet version of bland and smokey components and doesn’t really keep my interest much past the label and ingredient list, which seems innovative and tasty, but didn’t translate very well.  I will remark that there were some texture oddities and a few pieces that seemed processed in a weird way, so I’m sort of suspicious that this might be a situation of a bad batch (code on the jar is A15:53), and so I’d like Texas Brew to re-send one from another batch to validate this.  For now, it’s getting a Nuetral rating.  We’ll see what get after that.