Chili Sauce Recipe
For me, cooking is all about freedom. There’s no need to stick to any recipe, word-by-word, as long as you know what you are doing and what you want to accomplish. And this recipe for a Chili Sauce is an example of such freedom, anyone can taste.
I’d like to present you with mere guidelines and give you the basic knowledge, so you can create your own taste, enjoy not only the final result of your efforts, but the process, as well. Cooking should be enjoyed and that is, when we cook freely and happily.
I’ll explain why I chose the ingredients and methods I did, so you can understand and get inspired by it. Let’s begin with the ingredients.
The Ingredients:
80g (2.8 oz) Chili Peppers
540 g (19 oz) Hot Bell Peppers
5cl (1.7 fl. oz) Vinegar
5cl (1.7 fl. oz) Virgin Olive Oil
A few pieces of Fresh Parsley
2tsp Brown Sugar
2tsp Salt
1tsp Citric Acid
1tsp Freshly Ground Ginger
Some WaterWhy do you have to use the same ingredients? You don’t! Read on.
With this recipe I go for Bell Peppers, because they have thick juicy walls, full of taste. And this sauce is supposed to be put on food and eaten with a teaspoon, not licked off a toothpick, therefore less spiciness and more juiciness is welcome. The Chili Peppers then add a bit of a bang. You can vary the amounts and kinds of peppers, you use, for your recipe, according to your taste and tolerance. Can’t go wrong here.
For some chili sauce recipes, I used to add more Olive Oil, so that the consistency was thicker, that’s yummy and satisfying. After all, our mouths and stomachs have sensors for fats and prefer foods rich in fats. Plus Virgin Olive Oil is really healthy and helps our hearts to be happy. Nowadays, though, I prefer to rather use fresh Olive Oil, taken out of the fridge (contact with air and room temperature promotes creation of free radicals - those you don’t want in your oil), just before using it, as it’s not processed with heat and has a natural taste. Feel free to add how much you want, though, experiment with the consistency and taste.
Sugar helps bring out the sweetness of the peppers, complementing their hotness. Moreover, your body will feel like it’s getting a bit more of a reward, while you are rewarding yourself with all the hot capsaicin. A few pieces of Fresh Parsley is where the sauce gets unique. They add some color, taste and consistency. You can also experiment with other herbs and spices. What do you have on hand? A few leaves of Peppermint? Could be interesting. Next is Freshly Ground Ginger. My “grinding” consists in taking a knife and cutting a piece of dried ginger to very small pieces. Any kind of ginger could work, though, to promote the warm feeling inside, reminding of cold winter days. It is in perfect harmony with the heat of chili.
When trying to preserve food, such as chili peppers, the greatest challenge is not to let grow the harmful bacteria, therefore not to give yourself health problems and not to kill yourself with it. And at the same time, preserve all the goodies inside, like vitamins and taste. For this reason, just to be sure and safe rather than dead, I use more techniques at once, even though I have tried some of them alone and they work very well (I’m still here). We’ll talk about the process soon, first, the magical ingredients. Next on Citric Acid, Salt and Vinegar.
Citric Acid, naturally present in citrus fruit, you can get in the form of small white crystals. It has a sour taste and is often used in all kinds of foods, for preserving. Like beverages, tea, jams, canned food… What it does, is that it acts as a pH buffer and due to it’s antioxidant properties, it helps remove the air that the bad bacteria want to eat, in order to grow.
There are some nasty bacteria and toxins, that can grow even in anaerobic conditions. Like Botulinum toxin. Sice that is one of the most powerful toxins known to humankind, it is practical to prevent it’s presence in your chili sauce. Luckily it doesn’t like acidic environment very much, therefore using Vinegar is a good way to avoid it. It also adds a sour taste to the food, which I just love in combination with chilies.
Salt has been used for preserving food since forever and it is especially welcome in this recipe, as it adds to the taste. If you are concerned about health, as overusing salt causes some health problems, don’t worry, as you are not expected to eat a lot of the sauce at once, purely because of the hotness, so that amount of salt will not harm you at all. That’s it for preserving ingredients, about methods of preserving, later on.
The final ingredient in my recipe is Water. I add it as the last, to tune the right consistency.
Don’t forget, you can also add almost anything you fancy. Experiment with Herbs! The recipe could work well with some Parmesan, if you aren’t vegan. I added fresh Blueberries into one of my batches, they created a wonderful dark red color. An Apple could give it a nice consistency, because of the pektin. This is where you can play around and have fun.
Let’s have a look at what to do.
You want to get rid of the stems of the peppers. I leave all the seeds, as there is great hotness hiding in them, which I don’t want to lose. You can also cut the Parsley, if you are using it. It’ll end up in a food processor anyway, but I just cut it anyway, because it’s half of fun with Parsley.
The peppers will end up in a food processor, so cutting them is not really necessary, at all, but I like helping my processor this way to have an easier life with me and get better results more reliably. Also, I love cutting!
Here comes the easy part, let’s put it all together and push the button. How smooth you want your mixture to be is up just to you. I recommend rather smoother, than big chunks, because it’s easier to put them into cups later. If the consistency isn’t right, just add some water. Or oil, if you prefer that.
This is the toughest part of the recipe. Tasting and final edits. The closer to the final version in the first try, the better. Get more people to help you, if necessary.
I’ve met people who make super pure cold pressed extracts from various chili pepper kinds without any added ingredients, except for salt and I understand why. To have the fruity taste of Trinidad Moruga Scorpion or the smoky one of Naga Morich all the year in your fridge is very nice. But a pure taste of a pepper is not my goal here. This is a recipe for an amazing tasting sauce. Here, in this creative space between tastes you can dance and rejoice and make something that will make your food taste lovely and as complicated as you desire.
When you are confident this is exactly what you want, you are facing three options. You can:
- Cook the mixture for a few minutes, to help the tastes connect, soften the veggies and help the vinegar to penetrate them, so that the risk of toxins is lower.
- Or fill them into cups with a spoon and just sterilize the mixture then. This method preserves more vitamins and doesn’t make a chemical weapons battlefield of your whole kitchen, when uncovering the lid of the boiling mixture. It probably doesn’t kill you either. This is what I went for here.
- Fermentation. It’s a process of using nice bacteria to colonize your food and not give a chance to the bad ones. You don’t need to use heat then, which is super cool, because you preserve a lot of Vitamin C. We’ll look at this method some other time.
Here comes the filling. Before filling, don’t forget to wash the cups properly and sterilize the lids! (You sterilize them by boiling them for 10 minutes in water) An advice: Always have more cups ready, rather than less. Here I use 106ml (3.6 fl. oz) ones and 50ml (1.7 fl. oz) ones. Spoon is just a fine tool to fill them. Always keep the parts where the lid goes totally clean, to prevent it from spoiling.
Close the cups, according to the instructions provided by your cups and lids manufacturer.
Sterilization is up now. Put something on the bottom of a pot, so the cups don’t touch the bottom and fill the pot with water, but so that it isn’t all the way up and doesn’t touch the lids. You want the steam to do the magic on the lids. Bring it to boil and boil for 20 minutes. Your cups and lids manufacturer should provide you with instructions how to do this as well, you should follow them.
Take the cups out of the water and let cool. Congratulations! You have just created your own chili sauce! Your own special taste and something to be proud of all the following year. It should be good for at least a year, probably longer. I can’t guarantee it, as I always manage to eat or give away to friends all of it before the next season even begins, no matter how many batches I make.
Last thing to do is to put on some labels. They should say what it is, when it was made, because you will forget, trust me. I also add an identifying number of the batch and a code, so I know what ingredients and method of preserving I used. A picture on a label adds a bit of a sparkle to it.
Bon Appetite! If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
A Bonus! What to do with all the leftovers in the processor that are not enough for a whole cup?
Anything you want to! Here I added some cooked chickpeas to make a basis for a spicy falafel.
