Good & Gather Creamy Chipotle Sauce

There's a fine line between things that taste like they've been genuinely smoked and things that taste like they've had liquid chemical smoke added to them. This condiment falls very much into the latter category, unfortunately. There is, in fact, dried chipotle pepper in this product, although it's on down the ingredients list a ways. In my opinion, there's very little to suggest there's any significant amount of actual smoked, dried peppers in this sauce.

There's plenty that suggests it's made of water and canola oil, because it's mostly just oily and bland. You'd think it'd be a bit more tangy with sour cream, buttermilk powder, and greek yogurt powder in the ingredients. And yum, there's "bacterial cultures" in the mix. Twice! There's a hint of spice, but it's not enough to push this condiment into the category of "hot sauce." It's a very mild level of heat.

I shook the little squeeze bottle vigorously before pouring, as the oil had visibly separated from the rest of the mixture in the bottle. You can almost kind of see it in the picture at the top of the post—and that's already after a moderate amount of shaking the container. I absolutely manhandled the thing after snapping the pic to try to really get it blended well, but even after pouring, there was evidence the oil still hadn't reintegrated with the rest of the composite fully. Kinda gross.

I'm generally a fan of chipotle-flavored things. We even reviewed a chipotle salsa on this blog many moons ago. I think it's one of those flavors that has a lot of potential, but it's easy to screw up. I also think most Americans don't know what good chipotle flavor should taste like. In my humble opinion, this isn't it. Oddly, my Mexican-American wife wasn't quite as turned off by this sauce as I was, although she wasn't exactly wowed and agrees that the spice level is too low.

$2.79 for the 8.4 oz bottle. Not a repeat purchase for me. Maybe if it were cooked into some ground meat or poultry it would blend a bit better. We'll try it that way and report back.

I give this sauce 4 out of 10 stars.