The Best Chilli Sauce You Will Ever Taste
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 (as was). 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. And here’s another for vegan oca peanut stew with kale.
If you ever need to find out how hot chillies are, here’s a useful Scoville guide listing over 120 chilli varieties.
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 use 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.
How Long Will Chilli Sauce Last?
If you want your chilli sauce to keep well, it’s important that you use sterilised glass bottles to store it in. I have a handy post on how to sterilise glass jars, bottles and associated lids if you need it.
But in addition to this, you will need to give your filled bottles a hot water bath treatment. Here’s why. Unlike pickles and chutneys which have masses of vinegar to preserve them or jams where sugar does a similar job, there’s not enough acidity or sugar in this chilli sauce to prevent the proliferation of bacteria. So unless you heat treat the sauce once it’s cooked, harmful spoilage bacteria are likely to get established.
Store your chilli sauce in a cool dark place and it should last for a year. If you notice any sign of mould though, discard. Once you’ve opened the bottle, keep it in the fridge, where it should be good to go for a few weeks.
Hot Water Bath Treatment
Don’t fill your bottles to the very top. You need to leave a gap of about two and a half centimetres (one inch). This is because the sauce will expand as it heats up and it would be a shame to waste any of the chilli sauce you’ve just laboured over.
As soon as you’ve bottled the hot chilli sauce, screw the lids on, but only loosely. Air is pushed out as the sauce expands and it needs somewhere to go. Place the bottles in a large saucepan then fill it with warm water to at least three quarters the height of the bottles. But do make sure you don’t submerge them as the lids aren’t properly closed and you don’t want water getting into the sauce.
Bring the pan of water to the boil, then keep it at a rolling boil for twenty minutes. Be careful not to let the water boil too vigorously or again, you may get water in your sauce.
Take the bottles out as soon as the twenty minutes are up and tighten the lids with a cloth so that you don’t burn your hands. Leave to dry and cool before storing.
Update October 2014
The quantities given make six to eight 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 I also have a recipe for chilli and tomato chutney, which is sauce-like, considerably sweeter than my chilli sauce and isn’t as hot.
- For a delicious Asian angle on chilli sauce, try my crispy chilli oil. It’s good.
Other Chilli Recipes You Might Like
- Blackcurrant chilli jam
- Chilli chocolate chip cookie dough energy balls
- Chilli chocolate fudge
- Courgette sweetcorn fritters with chilli tomato sauce
- Freekeh with chilli chickpeas
- Sticky chilli broccoli
Keep in Touch
Thanks for visiting Tin and Thyme. If you make this best ever chilli sauce, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. And do please rate the recipe. Have you any top tips? Do share photos on your preferred social media site and use the hashtag #tinandthyme, so I can spot them.
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And for more sauce recipes, follow the link and you’ll find I have quite a lot of them. All delicious, of course.
Choclette x
Homemade Chilli Sauce. PIN IT.
The Best Chilli Sauce You Will Ever Taste – The Recipe
Homemade Chilli Sauce
Ingredients
- 2 lb hot red Locoto chilli or other thick fleshed chillies – halved and deseeded
- 2 sweet red peppers
- 8 oz shallots peeled and quartered
- 8 cloves garlic large – peeled and quartered
- 1 large cooking apple unnamed Cornish variety – peeled, cored and and cut into pieces
- ½ pt water
- 3 bay leaves
- 8 sprig fresh thyme
- ½ pt red wine vinegar + 1 tbsp
- 1 tsp sea salt
- 2 tsp arrowroot
Instructions
- Skin the red peppers by grilling them until the skins are black and blistered then put them in a plastic bag for 5 minutes to steam before removing the skins – it's still messy but a lot easier to skin this way.2 sweet red peppers
- Put the chillies, red peppers, shallots, garlic, apple, water, bay leaves and thyme into a large saucepan.2 lb hot red Locoto chilli, 8 oz shallots, 8 cloves garlic, 1 large cooking apple, ½ pt water, 3 bay leaves, 8 sprig fresh thyme
- Bring to the boil and simmer for ½ an hour.
- Add all but the tbsp of red wine vinegar and salt.½ pt red wine vinegar, 1 tsp sea salt
- Simmer for about another ½ hour.
- Remove bay leaves and thyme.
- Purée mixture using a hand-held blender.
- Mix the arrowroot with the reserved tbsp of red wine vinegar until blended.2 tsp arrowroot
- Stir this into the chilli mixture along with the salt and simmer for a further 3 minutes until the sauce has thickened slightly and is the consistency of tomato ketchup.
- Pour into 6-8 clean smallish sterilised glass bottles and cap. Leave an inch (2.5 cm) at the top as the sauce will expand whilst it's being heat processed.
- Heat process by placing bottles into a large saucepan filled with enough water so that bottles are ¾ covered. Bring water up to boiling point and simmer for 20 minutes.
Chilli, top of the pops!
Wonderful recipe, thank you so much.
I used my homegrown jalapenos with a few homegrown hungarian cherry chillies for a little extra heat.
I didn’t need to thicken as was thick enough. I’m assuming that your chillies are more juicy than mine.
My chilli mad brother loved this, and adds it to almost everything he eats!
Do you think this would work with green chillis and green peppers too? I always have so many green chilli’s left over at the end of the season.
Thanks again.
Hi Nicky, so pleased you (and your brother) like the recipe. I add the arrowroot not so much as a thickener, although it does do that, but because it makes it more “gloopy” and thus weirdly easier to pour.
As for green chillies, I don’t know why it wouldn’t work – as long as they’re hot ones. Just swap the red pepper for a green one. It will have a different flavour for sure, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Let me know how it goes if you do try it.
hi, im just about to make this. Is the 2lb chillies before or after deseeding please?
I weigh the chillies after deseeding, but you don’t need to worry too much about it as the mixture is simmered down until it gets to the right consistency anyway. Hope you enjoy it. I have a bottle of last year’s on the go right now.
Made a version of this today using this as a base idea recipe and tweaked because whilst I have a glut of chillis they’re very small fiery ones.
I used the same amount of red pepper and apple but reduced the water and vinegar and chucked in two home grown plum type Toms that needed using up & reduced the garlic. Was only looking to make a small batch. I did Chuck in a tsp of dark brown sugar too & continued to taste to get the right balance.
Whilst I didn’t follow your recipe to the tea, it was a great inspo and wanted to comment to encourage others not to be deterred by amounts in a recipe and experiment ☺️
Thank you Joanna. You’re a girl after my own heart. I almost never follow recipes exactly, but I find them so useful for inspiration. I’m very happy to have inspired you. Having said that, I’ve been making this chilli sauce for many many years now and it still remains my favourite.
Lovely sauce. I’ve made it for several years using Alberto’s and it keeps for a couple of years. Get your chilli seed from the Real Seed company (UK). NB. Not the USA Real Seed company – they sell marijuana seeds!
Hi Frank. Thank you. It’s my favourite chilli sauce. Some years we don’t harvest enough chillis to make it, so I usually make a big batch in case it has to last us – which it usually does. If we don’t have enough for the sauce, we take the seeds out, half the chillies and stick them in the freezer. Then whenever we need chilli for anything we can whip a half out, which is usually plenty enough for one dish. We use our own seeds as CT is breeding them to ripen earlier. But we use Real Seeds (not the US one) for lots of other things. They’re a good company.
What a wonderful sauce! Our son and daughter-in-law can’t get enough of chilli sauce!
I’m waist deep in red peppers right now! This sauce is looking like a way to use them up. I made a sauce with them yesterday using just the peppers and tomatoes. That was spicy since I left the seeds in. Maybe i’ll give this a goand see what happens. Thanks!
What a fortunate position to be in Diane. Love the idea of being waist deep in red peppers. Hope you get on well with it 🙂
Oooohhhhh Spicy !!! love the combo of chili and pepper sauces.
Thanks Molly. We do like our chillies over at Tin and Thyme HQ 😉
That’s fantastic! I love making large batches of preserves. And those bottles are super cute!
Thanks Byron, you’re right, those bottles are indeed cute 🙂
I love hot sauces and chili sauces. This sounds so good. I have never tried making it at home but this has inspired me!
Oh let me know if you give it a go Chris. The beauty of this one is that you can make it as hot as you like.
This looks like my kind of sauce. Thanks for sharing 🙂
Thanks Razena, when I say it’s the best, I really mean it 😉
That is such a lovely colour..would love to make my own chilli sauce 🙂
Ah well you have a recipe now Roy 😉
That Sauce Looks lovely. I have quite a few chillies at home, but I guess they still won’t be enough. I have to many different versions and then maybe a drop of the sauce could kill you … nah, maybe not, but I reckon it would be very very hot.
Ah the beauty of this sauce Chris is that you can substitute as many sweet red peppers as you like for hot chillies.
I have a taste bud for hot n spicy stuff and this looks like THE thing.. Awesome..
Haha, it rally is THE thing Abhilasha 🙂
Albertos Locoto chillies, have never heard of these but this recipe sounds fab, I love all my stirfries spiced up with some chilli sauce.
We love chilli sauce in this family so this is a recipe i will sure be trying. I think i would add a few chillies but not 2Lb lol, think that could be over kill for the kids.
My attempt also had 1 bell and 2 red italian peppers in there, so quite a bit of pulp.
& my apples went quite sticky, I think they aided it too.
If I’d used smaller hotter beasties, I’d have needed to thicken it, Choclette.
My husband is under orders not to use it all up in his salmon fishcakes!
Gill – thank you for letting me know. I’m really pleased folk are making this sauce. You’re photograph is great – love the bottle and I so love the colour. I think consistency depends on the type of chilli. The normal chillies I use makes a ketchup type of sauce where as when I’ve done it with our Fatalii (hot whew) which are thin skinned it came out as a much thinner sauce.
Ah, I’ve just made your chilli sauce recipe too just after you Celia, using red fresno peppers.
It’s delicious!
I haven’t been able to seal my jars so it will live in the fridge as long as it lasts.
Mine’s a thick ketchup consistency – which yielded about 500-600mil at a guess.
A very pleasant pepper blend you’ve given us there – minus the adult kick-ass burn. Nice one, and thank you. Gill.
Oh wonderful stuff Celia – I’m so glad someone else is trying this recipe out. Look forward to reading your post soon.
Choclette, I’ve just made five bottles of this sauce – it’s a wonderful recipe, thank you! I used two apples instead of one, and quite different chillies – will get it up on my blog soon. Thanks again! Celia
That looks WONDERFUL! The colour reminds me of those fabulously hot peri peri sauces we get from the Portugese chicken restaurants. Thanks for the link, Choclette, I’ll bookmark this for when our chilli bush really starts producing.
Cheers, Celia
Thanks for taking a look MaryMoh – the sauce is quite a hot one but now I’ve got used to it I sometimes have it on my toast for breakfast. I love the colour too – although the chillies are red, it’s the red pepper that really gives it such a beautiful shade of orangey red.
wow….beautiful colour of chili sauce. I would love it mixed into fried noodles…mmm… or as dipping for vegetable fritters. Thanks for sharing
Nice to have you drop by Hapi.
hello… hapi blogging… have a nice day! just visiting here….
oooo what a great idea, this would make a great gift.
Brilliant, thanks Choclette, I will show this to my husband and hint at trying to grow Alberto’s Locoto next year, they sound good. The sauce sounds very good, we still have a pile of our chillies left so will try to find the time to give this a go. Thank you for making an exception to post this on your lovely blog.
Kath