Fiery Foods UK National Chilli awards win­ner — “Best Import Product”

Eswat­ini Swazi Kit­chen — kum­quat Atchar

Its a monday night, work is all done for another day and i’m doing my best to relax..and what bet­ter way to relax than with a nice review of some­thing hot and spicy, best thing for these cold nights if you ask me!

The product I am review­ing today comes from a com­pany known as “Just trad­ing Scot­land” who sell fair trade products here in the uk on behalf of people from Africa, asia and latin amer­ica, one of the groups that they rep­res­ent is known as “Eswat­ini Swazi Kit­chen” and its that par­tic­u­lar group that have made the product I am review­ing today.

Eswat­ini was set up in 1991 by a cath­olic priest , Father Larry McDon­nell and an Anglican Nun Sis­ter Judith Dean O.B.E. to cre­ate jobs in Swazi­l­and for cer­tain com­munit­ies and to gen­er­ate funds for “Man­zini Youth Care” a non-government organ­iz­a­tion caring for chil­dren affected by HIV and AIDS. Eswat­ini has grown con­sid­er­ably over the years and cur­rently exports its qual­ity products to 14 dif­fer­ent inter­na­tional des­tin­a­tions includ­ing the US and UK.

It is also worth not­ing that the product i have here has also won a National Chilli award at the Fiery Foods UK fest­ival, it won first place in the “Best import product” category!

Ingredi­ents: Kum­quat fruit (65%), Sun­flower oil, Vin­egar, Spices, Chil­lies, Salt and Garlic.

Okay, as you can see from the list of ingredi­ents this is a very simple and straight­for­ward product, there is no pre­ser­vat­ives or addit­ives so its 100% nat­ural, the jar itself is a simple one with a white lid and the label is a beige sort of col­our, with red and green writ­ing on that stands out quite well, giv­ing the product a very unique and homemade look as opposed to the usual mas mar­ket uber col­our­ful approach!

The pickle (?) inside has a gor­geous orange hue to it, with flecks of red and brown through­out, sun­flower oil being high on the list of ingredi­ents my first thoughts were that this would be a little greasy, you have to ima­gine that its been a couple of months since the FFUK fest­ival so i could’nt remem­ber how this tasted, all i knew was that it won an award for good reason and I was about to relive that reason!

I twis­ted off the lid and held it up to my nose, allow­ing my olfact­ory senses to do the driv­ing for a brief moment, a very fruity and uplift­ing smell entered my nos­trils, not dis­sim­ilar to lime pickle but with some­thing dif­fer­ent in there..obviously this being a review i decided to allow my tastebuds to get their own opin­ion on this intriguing paste. I dipped in my tast­ing spoon and took out a nice heaped amount, pla­cing it between my lips I let it sit on my tongue before mov­ing it around inside my mouth to be able to fully appre­ci­ate and per­haps decipher the ingredients.

A won­der­ful fruity, spicy fla­vour was mak­ing its way around my senses, the kum­quat was imme­di­ately obvi­ous as was the chilli, I was pleasently sur­prised by the non-greasy tex­ture of the product too, the kum­quat cre­ated an alto­gether dif­fer­ent sen­sa­tion to any­thing else I had tasted and I cer­tainly would’nt have ever thought that kum­quats and chil­lies go together so well. The heat was mild but warm­ing and com­pli­men­ted the fruity zing of the main ingredi­ent, the gar­lic was more of a savoury after­thought but one that worked well as a part­ing gift to your mouth!

Just Trad­ing Scotland

I remembered fondly then how we came about giv­ing this par­tic­u­lar pickle the award, I smiled and had another spoon­ful while I tried to find a price for this item, ALAS!! i could not find one at all..in fact the only way I could find an indic­a­tion of where to pur­chase this product was to head over to http://www.justtradingscotland.co.uk/pages/Retailers and look down the list their, they also have the retail­ers on a handy map of bri­tain, so i’m sure you’re bound to find someone near to you that sells the “Eswat­ini” range!

This sort of thing would go well with white meat i feel, things like pork and chicken would take full advant­age of the fla­vours on offer, as would most veget­ables tbh..and I think it would go VERY well with my per­sonal favour­ite, CHEESE!!

Get thee to your nearest pur­vey­our of fair trade products as lis­ted on their site and grab a jar of this before they sell out, as i can guar­entee with this sort of fla­vour, as soon as people start to notice it, it will sell fast!! Until next time chile­headz, may the sauce be with you!!!

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Please visit our spon­sor www.hot-headz.com

Pos­sibly Related posts:

1. Swazi Fire Chilli Sauce Review
2. Chile­foundry News­let­ter Novem­ber 2009

One Response to “Eswatini Swazi Kitchen — Kumquat Atchar”

1. southbrae says:

   November 4, 2009 at 10:46 am

   Quite a lot of good chilli stuff in this range — well worth check­ing out! I dis­covered that if you go to the JTS web­site you can click on a link on the ‘Our Products’ page and browse the cata­logue which shows retail prices. £2.75 is the price for most of the Eswat­ini range it seems. Sal­iv­at­ing review, Darth.