Some like it hot

It’s no secret that in our home, I’m the chilli monster. With a bumper harvest of hot chillis this year the making of chilli sauce was an inevitability. Being my first true season as a “gardener,” I sought the help of a neighbour to start some seedlings for me. Amongst the seedlings that she started were some rather delightful hot chillis of various shapes and sizes. In all, I planted around 20 hot chilli plants. Here then is a quick and simple “recipe” for the chilli sauce that I made. “Recipe” is in quotation marks because, as you will see, this is more an idea than a recipe. I love pottering around in the kitchen but absolutely detest the idea of following a recipe. I would encourage you to, particularly if you have never tried making your own chilli sauce (assuming of course that you enjoy chilli sauce) you give this simple method a try.

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You will need:

• A wide mouth glass bottle or jug to blitz the ingredients in if you’re using a stick blender.

• A handful of hot chillis. Here you can mix and match and use different varieties to change the flavour profile. I mixed red and green chillis with seeds in. Removing the seeds will tame the fire a bit.

• A largish green or red pepper (capsicum.) Here you could also mix and match and use smaller peppers of various colours.

• A handful of cherry tomatoes or a couple of normal tomatoes. (I use whatever is in the garden at the time of making the sauce) You could conceivably use tinned tomatoes here but freshly grown has to be better!

• A smallish onion

• A couple (or few, if you’re a garlic-aholic) cloves of garlic. I used 4 large ones.

• About a teaspoon of table salt.

• Around a ¼ cup of vinegar (I used apple cider but any vinegar will work)

• A couple of tablespoonsful of oil (I used olive oil)

• A generous tablespoonful of honey (sugar will also work)

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Peel the onions and the garlic, wash the veg and layer everything in the jar. (Cut whichever veg needs cutting to make it easier for your blender and to fit it into the jar.) I don’t cut the chillis as I’m using the seeds and “violent chilli hands” are not pleasant. I simply chop off the stems and shove them in the jar. I highly recommend that, unless you really want to tone down the heat of the finished product, you handle the chillis as little as possible with bare hands.

I tend to pack the tomatoes at the bottom and then finish off with the chillis at the top. The exact osequence is not important. I add the salt, honey, vinegar and oil last but again, the order is not really important.

Finally, blitz everything with a stick blender or other blitzing instrument of choice and “VOILA!” You have chilli sauce!

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Obviously, by playing around with the ratios of ingredients, you can change both flavor balance and consistency of the sauce. Adding more tomatoes for example will make the sauce thinner and better suited to cooking than as a condiment. I have with some of my mixes added fresh or dried herbs, spices and balsamic vinegar.

I often use this sauce as is for a quick marinade for grilled chicken.

This recipe cans well with a hot water bath canning method but one does need to pay attention to head space.

I really hope that you will give this simple hot chilli sauce a try. It is super quick and easy and depending on your chillis, will add some fire to the party 😀