Excellent chilli sauce recipe. Produces a rich sweet chilli sauce flavour with a hint of ginger and garlic. I have been making at least a dozen bottles each year a good twenty years now.
INGREDIENTS
- 2 kg sugar.
- 1.5 litres of cider vinegar
- 300 g fresh red chillies
- 100 g fresh garlic
- 50 to 100 g of fresh ginger
- 1 teaspoon of salt
DIRECTIONS
- Cut chillies lengthwise and scrape away the seeds with a spoon
- Finely chop the ginger, garlic and chilli halves.
- Puree ginger, garlic and chillies with some vinegar and place in a pot.
- Add the rest of vinegar, sugar and salt and stir.
- Cook on a slow boil until a syrupy consistency is reached.
- Poor into sterilised bottles and cap.
FURTHER NOTES
Makes around six small bottles of sauce. I use medium hot chillies, however if you want to make it hotter add more chillies or use a hotter chilli variety such as Jalapeno. This recipe is a little hotter than most commercial sweet chilli sauces, so if you want your sauce to be more like a commercial sweet chilli sauce then use fewer chillies. I also use less salt than the original recipe, so people might want to add more salt.
While chilli and sugar make a great preservative I prefer to run my bottles through the Fowlers Preserving System to ensure they don’t go off. Though unopened bottles of chilli sauce should last for a good twelve months without being preserved in a Fowlers unit.
LEFT: Chillies with stems cut off. RIGHT: Chillies after they have had their seeds removed and been chopped up into small pieces.
The chillies that I use to make the sauce are almost always from my food garden.