Cuisine Scene Asian-Style Sauce product reviews

I love trying different dressings to get the taste of them to work out if I want to buy them or not. This one sung out to me as I love putting a dressing on my fried rice or using as a dipping just for different things. Weird? Yea that's me .

When I first got it I must admit I freaked with all that oil sitting on top, and thought it would taste very oily and that's not what I like. It says give it a good shake, well I had to really shake it up hard to get it all to mix in as oil is a hard thing to mix with other things. Once I got it mixed it was looking a lot better which made me feel a bit better about giving it a go. The smell of it, I felt, was sweet but the taste was very far off sweet. There was a good tang to it and I felt it threw out a lot of different flavours, which is what Asian food is generally about.

I tried this through some rice and it was good, gave the rice dish just a little more flavour than I would normally give it when I do a quick rice dish for the kids, I loved how it lead though the dish. The one thing I did like about this is how you can use it as a dipping sauce as well. I did with my home made chicken nuggets and it just gave it more of a taste, next time will put some into the mixture as well.

Sadly for this, the price is way out of my budget for any type of sauce or dressing so it's not something I would go out and buy again - mainly because its not gluten free, but that has nothing to do with how nice it tastes. I would recommend it to those that like the Asian flavours as there are many things you can do with it, salads, stirfrys, rice dishes and a simple dipping sauce.

I love a good asian style sauce and so asking to be considered for this was a no-brainer really.

Getting this, the first thing that I noticed was the amount of oil, which for me personally, was a bit off putting, but I needed to give it a good try and so I put that aside. I gave it a good shake but found that the oil separated very quickly, meaning I didn't manage to open it quickly enough to try and taste it by dipping my finger in it, but once I got my technique down it was a lot easier. My first thoughts on this was that it has a rather lovely smell and even just getting a taste of the oil, I could taste the chilli in it.

I love that this is vegetarian friendly, always a big plus in our house, and so I settled into the kitchen to make dinner using this sauce. I decided to syringe out about 5mls of the oil to put into my water that I boiled the rice in, this gave a nice little hint of flavour to the rice when it was finished cooking. I then gave a good shake and poured some into a bowl, adding some vegetarian oyster sauce and some authentic Japanese sake, mixed it together well (with lots of input from my three year old on the taste) and then cooked it with some vegetarian protein. This made a delicious sauce that even my kids polished off their plates.

I really like the sauce and its potential, the price is higher than I would normally spend, but given how much you need to use it would last quite awhile, so I can see me buying this again in the future.

We have used this dressing in a variety of ways since we received it. It has tasted really nice on salad, veges, pasta and meat. As noted on the side of the bottle, it does need a good shake prior to pouring as the oil separates when it settles. It has a distinct Asian taste to it due to the garlic, ginger, chilli and lime flavours. The sesame oil is also rather noticeable. These are all flavours that I enjoy. The chilli gives quite a kick, which, in my opinion, is still rather pleasant. With the strength of the chilli, it wasn't a dressing that the children enjoyed. I am quite happy to keep this one all for us adults anyway.

The serving amount indicated on the side of the bottle seems about right - about 10 ml per serving. The pourer on the bottle allowed us to use the amount we required without it dripping down the side of the bottle or gushing out. The bottle is a nice size and shape. It looks good on a table for serving directly from the bottle. We couldn't find any storage directions on the bottle. We made the assumption that in the pantry was a fine place to store it as there didn't seem to be any ingredients which require refrigeration.

My preference in food is to have ingredients which are real food. The list of ingredients in this dressing are easy to recognise and I could replicate it with items from my own pantry if I chose to (if I knew the correct amounts of each of course). The dressing certainly passed the test for good ingredients (and no horrible unknown "food" items such as colours and numbers).

I like to see the fact that the dressing is made in the Waikato - there is something special about products made close to home. I have tried other products in the cuisinescene range and I haven't been disappointed with any of them. I will definitely consider purchasing more of this dressing once I use up this bottle.

Although I wouldn't normally want to pay $10.50 for a dressing, I think that this one is worth it in every way. The taste is just devine and it is a quality product.