The best salsa sauce ever! (Asda Salsa sauce)

Member Name: sun-is-shining

Product:	Asda Salsa sauce
Date:	15/07/09 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: great taste, quality ingredients, cheap

Disadvantages: none

Unfortunately I'm living in a town without ASDA but a couple of weeks ago we drove the 45min to the next outlet to find out if ASDA is really as great as the reviews on here suggest.

I was positively surprised; the range of products is very diverse and prices are comparable to Tesco's.

The ASDA Hot Salsa sauce was one of the highlights of this shopping trip - a great dip for tortilla chips and also very nice as a pasta sauce.
-----------------------

Look & Taste

The salsa sauce comes in a medium sized glass jar and looks brightly red with little green pieces of herbs - coriander leafs to be accurate. I don't like these dark dips that look more like BBQ sauce and you cannot even recognise the tomato content.

The sauce smells lovely, a quite strong tomato scent with refreshing lime juice - it smells more like a normal pasta sauce than a salsa dip. It smells quite spicy but that's because of the red and green pepper and not because of an actual spiciness.

Now to the actual taste; it is surprisingly mild given that the label gives it 3 chillies. For me it is not more than medium spicy but nonetheless very tasty. You can easily taste the refreshing of the lime juice and the coriander. The tomato and pepper chunks are quite small; you won't end up with big lumps of pepper on your crisp. I couldn't find much onion chunks and I think that they maybe have been blended into the sauce rather than chopped.
It's a very light sauce; a nice mix between tomato and pepper. The Coriander tastes great in this combination and makes the sauce even more interesting. It's great as a dip for tortilla chips or if you prefer also with normal crisps. The sauce sticks nicely to the crisp and doesn't make it soggy as it's not too watery.

Even after a few days in the fridge the dip stays ok and doesn't look watery as the Tesco dip does, it is so annoying that you cannot store it for long or it goes all soggy but the ASDA versions was alright even after 5 days. By the way, the label that once opened you should consume the sauce within 3 days - in my experience it lasts over a week.

We actually tried with some pasta and it tasted great, much better than some of the ready-made pasta sauces you can normally find in shops. Also it is a lot lighter and has fewer calories. Give it a try and you'll be surprised how good it tastes!
-----------------------

Ingredients & Nutrition

I quite like reading the nutrition info on the back of the packing so let me share my newly found knowledge about the Salsa Dip with you. The front label informs us that the ASDA Salsa Sauce doesn't contain any artificial colours, flavours or hydrogenated fat. The salsa is also suitable for Vegetarians and Vegans. The allergy advice says that it 'may contain traces of nuts and/or seeds'.

The salsa contains:
* Tomato 56%
* Red pepper 14%
* Onion 8%
* Concentrated tomato puree 7%
* Water
* Green pepper 4%
* Modified maize starch
* Spirit Vinegar
* Sugar
* Tabasco Sauce
* Coriander leaf 0.5%
* Lime juice
* Cayenne 0.3%
* Salt, Pepper, Garlic

ASDA also gives the nutrition information for 50g. They obviously calculated that the salsa lasts for 6 servings but I don't really know what they mean with that, 50g per crisp would be a bit much and for a whole pack not even remotely enough. Anyway, here are the typical values for 50g.

* 15kcal
* Protein - 0.6g
* Carbohydrate - 3.0g
* Fat - 0.1g
* Fibre - 0.8g
* Sodium - 0.09g
* Salt 0.2g

These nutrition values are actually quite good; especially the calorie count is very low.
-----------------------

Price & Value

80 pence is a great price for this tasty salsa sauce compared to the 1.50 for a Doritos salsa. I'd happily get the ASDA own brand again if I had to chose between these two - and not because of the price but because of the great taste.

300g is enough for a few of crisps & TV evenings or for two pasta dishes.

This salsa is definitely my favourite and next time I go to ASDA I probably buy a huge stock so I'll never run out of this great dip!

For me it is a 10 out of 10 with a little star!
-----------------------

Summary: see review