The Best Chilli Sauce You Will Ever Taste

Gifts, Preserves, Sauces | 11th November 2009 | By Choclette

This recipe really is for the best chilli sauce you will ever taste. It’s a medium hot ketchup style chilli sauce, but is packed with flavour. It can be used as an ingredient in recipes, but is at its best drizzled over the top of eggs, tomato dishes or spread into a cheese or tofu sandwich.

I know, I know. What’s this got to do with chocolate I hear you ask? Well to be honest very little, other than chilli and chocolate come from the same part of the world and as Kath The Ordinary Cook pointed out, they do go very well together. I was recently asked for my homemade chilli sauce recipe and as it’s one of my own and very dear to my heart I have decided to go against my own rules and put it on my chocolate blog. Read on to find out how to make the best chilli sauce you will ever taste.

Alberto’s Locoto

We grow Alberto’s Locoto which are hardier than most chillies and we grow them outdoors. The pepper is one of the oldest domesticated chillies. It originates in the Andes and is known variously as the tree chilli, apple pepper, rocoto and manzano; its scientific name is Capsicum pubescens. It’s particularly good for making chilli sauce as the fruits are large and thick fleshed. These peppers have a lot of flavour and have more of a warming quality rather than a burning one. That said, I stuffed them with chocolate and cream cheese once before cooking in the foolish belief that the cream cheese would cool them down. It didn’t have quite the desired effect.

Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get our Alberto’s locoto ripe this year so we picked them green and have been waiting for them to ripen in our not so warm house. Today was the day we could wait no longer and luckily many of them were nice and red.

CT is just a little bit obsessed with the Lost Crops of the Incas. I’ve tried many an unusual vegetable and fruit since I met him. Apart from this locoto chilli, oca is a root we eat quite often. Here’s a recipe for chilli roasted oca, just in case you ever get your hands on some.

Homemade Chilli Sauce

My chief taster helped out a bit with this chilli sauce, he got the fun job of deseeding all the chillies! Once that job is done, the rest is pretty straightforward. It’s mostly a case of adding everything to the pan, boiling it up and then blending.

You can make this sauce milder by using more red peppers and less chillies. The red peppers give the sauce a wonderful colour and help to flavour it. The quantities I have used make for a light ketchup type consistency. But you can make it thicker or runnier by adding more or less arrowroot. I’ve also made a runnier version of this sauce using our yellow Fatalii chillies and yellow sweet peppers. It worked well but was very very hot, so we only use it for cooking.

My tongue is now burning from tasting the sauce. It’s not the hottest sauce in the world, but you generally don’t need a great deal of it! In my humble opinion, this is the best chilli sauce ever – good and hot, but also flavoursome.

Update October 2014

The quantities given make 6-8 bottles depending on size. The photographs are for a much larger batch I recently made with a friend.

Celia over at Fig Jam and Lime Cordial has made a version of this recipe you might want to look at.
And Jac over at Tinned Tomatoes has a recipe for sweet chilli jam.

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Homemade Chilli Sauce. PIN IT.