Chili Sauce

How do you feel about a bit of spice? How about a lot of spice? When I was younger I could only eat the mildest of curries and spicy foods. My delicate little tongue couldn’t handle too much chili. Even as I grew older and started to appreciate chili flavours more and more, I was still on the mild flavours. But I had to harden up fast when I moved in with my boyfriend and house mates as they love love LOVE chili! Basically any dish that can have chili in it, does, without fail. It’s at the point now where we have frozen chilies on our freezer and a jar of chili sauce in the fridge for daily use. I’m proud to say I’m pretty good with a bit of spice these days!

The sauce we had was a batch made by the boyfriends dad, but we as we came to the end of our last jar I decided to have a crack at making my own for the house. How hard could it be?

We used a mixture of different chilies; regular long red and green chilies, birds eye and habanero chilies. I bought a big bag of mixed chilies  (probably double what is in the first image below) and that made 2 jars of sauce. The measurements aren’t exact, we like our sauce extra hot so we left all the seeds in, but you can discard them or else use less chilies overall for a milder flavour.

What You Need:

Lots of Chilies!
1 small onion
4 - 6 cloves of garlic
A 3cm piece of ginger
1 bunch of coriander
1/4 cup of Red wine vinegar
1/4 cup of Olive Oil

What You Do:

1. De-seed the chilies according to your tastes. If you like it hot keep them in, or else discard.

2. Roughly chop the chilies, garlic, ginger, onion and coriander. Blend in a food processor in batches until all the ingredients are extra finely chopped and mixed together.

3. Transfer to a large pot over medium heat and add about 1/4 of a cup of red wine vinegar and the same of olive oil.  Cook, stirring regularly, allowing the liquid to reduce as you cook. You want to let everything to soften but not burn.

4. Reduce the heat to a low setting and continue to cook and stir until the mixture starts to form a thick paste. If it looks too dry or thin, add another splash of red wine vinegar and allow to reduce again. Season with salt and pepper.

5. Once the sauce has achieved a good consistency, take off the heat and allow to cool to room temperature.  Then spoon into jars and store in the fridge overnight to allow flavours to mature.

Use your sauce when cooking curries, stir fries and even a little spoonful in casseroles and meat dishes will give your meal a little extra flavour. The vinegar will keep in the fridge for a few weeks, so depending on how much you make, freeze any left overs if you don’t think you will use it very quickly. Our first attempt turned out pretty well, we’ve already used up most of it. I’m looking forward to improving the recipe with future batches. What about you guys? Have you got a recipe for chili sauce? What are your secret ingredients?