Quick home-made chilli sauce

Let’s spice up our lives

These were the chillies I had in at the time. If you want more smokey fruitiness and less spice you can replace the habanero with ancho and the paprika could be replaced with chilli de arbol

Chilli sauces are available practically everywhere, but most are necessarily filled with salt and chemicals in order to prolong shelf-life. This may be something you wish to avoid so here is quick and easy recipe which contains no salt and gives you the control to dictate the level of spiciness you like.

So, the first, you need to remove the seeds from the chillies — remember this will not change the spice content of the chilli at all. It is a common misconception that chilli seeds are where the spice comes from, when in fact it is the membrane that attaches the seeds to the flesh that holds the most heat. So, we remove the seeds mostly to help with the texture of the final sauce.

Once the chillies are deseeded you can place them in a blender with 200ml water. Allow the flesh of the chillies to soften for ten minutes before adding the tomatoes, spring onions and ground spices.

I don’t bother taking the skin of the tomatoes and I figure it’s all good roughage anyway.

Blend all the ingredients together and place the liquid in a pan.

You should then add a further 100 ml water to the pan and let the sauce bubble while cooking out the spices for around 30 minutes — checking every 5 minutes.

Once you are happy with the texture and flavour — it will be spicy, so just try a little bit — you can decant it into a jar and store in the fridge.

Remember, spice levels can vary massively from one chilli to the next, even if they’re the same variety — proceed with caution or a healthy level of knowing self-flagellation.

There are 1001 different uses for this sauce too, so far I have used it on top of Buddha bowls as a spicy dressing with olive oil, I’ve added it to tomatoes to make an arrabbiata sauce for pasta, I’ve used it in place of the chilli sauce on a vegan kebab and you can even make the most amazing Mexican breakfast dish, chilaquiles.

Ingredients

3 large tomatoes ∙ 4 spring onions ∙ tablespoon onion powder ∙ half a tablespoon Spanish chilli powder ∙ half a teaspoon of cinnamon powder ∙ half a teaspoon Annatto powder (optional) ∙ 2 Habaneros chillies ∙ 10 Hungarian spicy paprika chillies ∙ 2 Cascabel chillis