Nagi Nagi Hot Chilli Sauce

The company name Nagi Nagi comes from one of Paul’s colleagues who used to call the Naga chilli, Nagi Nagi instead of Naga, after the name stuck they found out that Nagi in Polish means naked…which I think is quite appropriate as their products contain no additives

A bottle of Nagi Nagi Hot Chilli Sauce has just landed on my desk so I will give it a try over the next couple of days, I’m pretty sure it will be great on boxing day turkey sandwiches.

It retails at £3.50 per bottle and the bumf says

“Our HOT sauce is lovingly crafted from the very finest sourced ingredients. We hand pick every ingredient in this sauce and guarantee it will tantalize and tease your taste buds to the EXTREMES.We have achieved a very fine balance of heat with taste. This very versatile sauce will compliment and spice up even the most ordinary dish.”

I really love the sound of that and the branding and the description on the bottle are great, although it could do with the website on but that’s just me being picky!!

You can follow Paul on twitter here, check out his facebook page here or buy stuff from his site here.

Spot The

I’ve just been sent a copy of Ching’s Fast Food for review, after the success of her TV series,  Ching-He Huang has decided to pay homage to the Chinese Takeaway with this new cookbook.

I had a quick flick through last night and it looks fantastic there’s plenty of recipes to keep just about every Chinese and Cantonese food fan happy, there’s plenty of meat, fish and vegetable recipes  some with a good helping of chilli too.  The recipes are split up into handy sections and with the exception of delicious looking deep fried dishes the recipes seem reasonably healthy and should give the takeaway a run for it’s money.

The recipes seem simple and straightforward and the ingredients should be easy to get hold of so I will write more once I’ve cooked a couple of recipes which will be in the very near future as my mouth was watering just flicking through the book.

In amongst the recipes there’s some great photography and what look like interesting anecdotes so I will certainly be having a read of those.

If you’d like to get your self a copy or even better get a copy for someone else for Christmas then you can currently get it for £6 on the WHsmith website here. You can also visit Ching’s websit here

The package it’s self came in a huge box with super hero survival kit on it, one opening I found a scroll with my mission on it, a brilliant hand drawn cartoon of me as a super hero, some invisibility glasses, Kick-ass on DVD, Worst case scenario survival handbook and most importantly some Jalapeno Fire Doritos and Pepsi Max Citrus freeze. It was all very well thought out and I really love the picture.

The crisps them selves were great, incredibly moreish, had a lovely smokey flavour and a nice bit of heat, they worked quite well with some hummus and also some sour cream but personally I’d just munch them on their own.

The Pepsi was a little sweet for me but my other half liked it so I let her drink it and snaffled a few extra crisps while she topped her glass up.

Doritos Jalapeño Fire retail at around £2.37 per 250g pack and Pepsi Max Citrus Freeze retails at £1.89 for 2 litres.

Check out the website here , facebook here, twitter here, here and here

Sweet or Hot it's all pot luck..

Last week the excellent A Quarter Of sent me what could be the next hot thing this Halloween. For those of you who haven’t heard of A Quarter Of they are one of the biggest online sweet shops, specialising in retro sweets and treats for the whole family, not only that they are celebrating their 10th anniversary next year.

So you may be thinking what has this got to do with chillis? Well to celebrate Haloween they have released a nice new touch on apple bobbing,  in the form of Trick or Sweet apple sherbert pips. These are no ordinary apple pips for 1 in every 10 pips hides a dark secret, they are laced with hot and spicy chilli. There’s little to no difference in colour between the chill and non chilli pips so it really is down to chance.

Each pip is flavoured with real Cox’s apples and has no artificial flavours or colourings…..they are darn tasty too, I was planning on saving them for the trick or treater’s but have ended up munching most of them. The chilli ones pack quite a punch, they wont leave you gasping for breath but they will give you a little bit of a shock.

They come in at £2.27 for a 160g tub which is a bargain if you want to see the faces on either your party guests or the kids at the door in a couple of weeks time.

If you fancy some you can buy them online here, while you are there you could treat your self to some old school classics or some of the other chilli sweets they sell

Both are  new ranges from parent company Mars, and I’ll write some more about the Uncle Bens ones seperately.

dolmio pastavita tomato and chilli pasta pot

This Dolmio PastaVita comes in to little pots, one containing the pasta the other containing the sauce, The concept is simple, open each pot a little bit, put both pots in the microwave then heat on full power for 90 seconds, carefully tip the sauce over the pasta and your lunch is ready.

The 300g serving is just the right size for lunch or a light snack, the pasta was nice and soft but still had a little bite to it, the sauce it’s self was delicious, predominantly tomato flavoured but with plenty of nice earthy herbs and sweet roast garlic followed by a decent chilli kick, not super spicy but enough to let you know there’s chilli in the sauce.

My only criticism would be the texture of the sauce, for me it could have done wtih a few more lumps, maybe some mushroom or corn to bulk it out a little and add a little extra, although I did solve this by adding some slices of left over sausage that I had in the fridge.

They retail at £2 per pot and are a great alternative to the dried pasta pots where you add water and usually end up with a slimey mess, they are also great if you don’t have a fridge at work as they don’t need to be kept cool.

If you want to know more then check out the Dolmio website here.

They come in a really posh looking tube, that’s obviously Eastern inspired, with the shapes and stand out gold leaf on the sides. The tin with it’s metal lid also feels really nice and adds that extra bit of luxury.

Inside the tub the biscuits are stacked neatly in a black plastic tray and wrapped in clear cellophane to keep them fresh.

On ripping open the cellophane I was greeted with a whiff of chocolate and a hint of spice, quite surprising as I wasn’t really expecting biscuits to smell of much.

The biscuits are quite thin and have a lovely texture, crispy and crumbly, the predominant flavour is the cocoa which is dark, rich and really chocolatey. Then the fruity sweet and sour cherries come through followed by a rather spicy and slightly smoky chilli kick, which has quite a burn to it that lingers for a while after you’ve finished the biscuit.

Sometimes chilli and chocolate really doesn’t work, usually because the chocolate over powers the chilli and there’s not enough heat to let you know the chilli is there, fortunately with these biscuits all the flavours stand out and the chilli kick is fantastic, certainly not a disappointment.

If you’d like to give them a go you can buy the 150g tub from here for just over a fiver, while not cheap they are delicious and worth treating your self to.

Spicy, packed full of flavour but a bit too much garlic

Basically the crust is breadcrumbs flavoured with various herbs and spices, in this case it was  Chilli, Rosemary, Garlic and Herb.  On opening the tub I knew it was going to be packed full of flavour as I could instantly smell the garlic and rosemary. The crumbs looked like a nice texture, with a mix of bigger and smaller chunks, there were flecks of red chilli and bits of rosemary mixed throughout the crunchy golden crumb.

I rubbed a little bit of olive oil onto two chicken breasts, then pressed a good amount of the crumb all over, it seemed to stick quite well and coated all of the chicken. I sprinkled a little more on the top of each breast for good measure and then put them in the oven for 30mins.

While they were cooking I knocked up some spuds and veg to go with it and roast a few cherry tomatoes as that was suggested on the back of the pack.

After 30mins the crumb had browned nicely and to my surprise hadn’t burned, I’m always a little wary of packet bread crumbs as they either seem to go soggy or burn…maybe that’s just me.

The chicken it’s self had stayed incredibly moist and was cooked perfectly, the crumb was crispy all round, it hadn’t even gone soggy on the bottom of the chicken, so it gave a lovely crunch as you bit into it.

As predicted it was full of flavour, the predominant flavour was the garlic, if anything it was a little over powering, once that had died down the rosemary came through with a little woody sweetness  and then the chilli flavour came in before leaving a little burn at the back of your throat.

The heat leaves surprised me a lot, it was rather fiery and it certainly built up as I devoured the chicken, It was incredibly moreish despite the garlic and in no time at all it was all gone.

So I am pleased to report I would buy the Chilli Rosemary, Garlic and Herb Crust again, I’m even going to try it on some fish and maybe some lamb and will let you know how I  get on.

Warning, contains serioulsy moreish recipes!

Since winning the competition Thomasina has gone on to open a successful chain of Mexican restaurants called Wahaca and presented some really interesting cooking shows on TV.

The latest of which is Mexican food made simple, which judging from the first program is going to be a cracking series, but that’s what I was expecting and hoped for after reading and cooking from the book that accompanies the series.

I’m not sure how long I’ve had the book but I did buy it when it was first released and have since cooked my way through quite a lot of it.

The recipes range from really quick and easy to ones that require a little bit more effort.  At first I was a little worried about sourcing some of the ingredients not having a really good deli round here, but a lot of them can be bought from supermarket or from the Internet, for those  that are hard to find alternatives are often suggested so you don’t have to miss out.

The recipes are nice and easy to follow and really well written,  there’s a great range of starters, fresh and zingy salads and even desserts to keep you coming back for more and the recipes I’ve tried have been delicious, especailly the spicy summer tacos, mexican breakfast and spicy steak and mushroom sandwich. The recipes I’ve tried have been easy to up/down scale for more or less people and the spice levels can also be easily adjusted to make them spicer or less spicy if you wish.

It retails for around £20 but can be found a lot cheaper if you hunt around, It’s well worth adding to your collection if you like mexican inspired food or just fancy a change.

If you want to watch the show it’s on Channel 5 at 19:30 on Tuesday nights or if you have missed an episode you can watch them here

A little bit too bitter

The packet promises that the glaze will turn any poultry or fish into a hedonistic cacao-fest ,using a combination of Guajillo and Ancho chillis added to unsweetened 96% cacao. The recipe on the back of the pack suggested using it with Tuna and sweet potato, I decided to keep the sweet potato but substitute the tuna for chicken.

The glaze it’s self is like grated chocolate which you can see a few of the spices in, I added a bit to the chicken at the end and let it cook out for a little bit.

The chocolate clung to the chicken really well with only a little bit leaking out into the pan, if I am honest I found the glaze far to bitter and lacking any other real flavour. It was a little bit gutted as I had expected a bitter sweet chocolate flavour and then a bit of a chilli kick somewhere in there but there wasn’t any, just dark, rich, bitter chocolate, it was left my mouth feeling really dry too.

Don’t get me wrong I love dark chocolate and bitter food and drink but this was just to bitter.

It might work quite well in Chilli con carne to add a bit of depth but other than that I’m struggling to think of ways to use it up.

If you haven’t got a Hotel Chocolat near by, you can buy it online here,

Last week I went to Berlin and found a nice little shop called the Pfefferhaus (9 euro’s). Seeing as the whole shop was all about chili’s, I couldn’t wait to buy some. I bought some smoked peppers, got myself a free smoked habanero chili and bought a bottle of One Fuckin Drop at a Time as it was recommended by the owner.

Scoville rating has it between 350.000 and 800.000 units depending on how many
drops you use.

No way I could try it out in just any dish so I decided to have it in a nice chili as it needs heat.

It comes in a nice bottle with quite the warning text on the bottle. Being in the name, it comes with a dropper. Not really something you want to re-use for eyedrops when you finish the bottle…

Of course, me being a total idiot, I decided to try it “raw”, as in: one drop on the tongue.

It’s been a while since I’ve had that much intense heat on my tongue. Later I looked at my tongue in the mirror and was amazed to see that
no blisters or burn marks had formed. Definitely do-able but not for the faint of heart.

I made my chili (just a simple variation on Andy’s), added a drop, stirred and tried a little bit. Then another drop or 2. And few more
followed till I felt the heat rise high enough. In retrospect I *might* have overdone it a little bit and could have added 5 drops instead of 8, but it didn’t ruin the meal.

Rating with food: 7/10

Not a bad aftermath. The heat when combined with food, for me at least, was a nice and slow burn. Not an instant mulekick to the head
like having it raw. When combined with food it got hotter after a few seconds and left a nice aftertaste. After finishing the meal I
noticed how sweaty my head was, been a while since I had sweat on the back of my head

Would I try this again? Oh hell yes. I have a nice idea for spicy ribs churning away in my brain…