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 for many years.
INGREDIENTS
- 3 kg sugar.
- 1.8 litres of cider vinegar.
- 450 g fresh red chillies.
- 150 g fresh garlic.
- 160 g of fresh ginger.
- 2 teaspoons of salt.
DIRECTIONS
- CUT THE ENDS OFF THE CHILLIES THEN SPLIT THEM LENGTHWISE AND SCRAPE AWAY THE SEEDS WITH A SPOON
- PEEL GARLIC AND GINGER AND LOOSELY CHOP
- BLEND CHILLIES, GARLIC AND GINGER IN A FOOD PROCESSER
If you only have a blender (E.G. Barmix) then you will need to chop the ingredients into smaller pieces. It helps to add a small amount of vinegar to aid in the blending process.
- PLACE THE BLENDED INGREDIENTS IN A POT AND ADD THE REST OF THE VINEGAR, SUGAR AND SALT
- COOK ON A SLOW BOIL UNTIL A SYRUPY CONSISTENCY IS REACHED
This will take somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour. Make sure to stir the mixture regularly. - POOR INTO STERILISED BOTTLES AND CAP
While chillies, sugar and salt 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.
FURTHER NOTES
Makes around 10 small bottles of sauce. I use Cayenne chillies (moderately hot), however if you want to make your sauce hotter then 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.
To process the chillies I cut the ends off and split them in half before stripping the seeds out with a spoon.
The chillies that I use to make sweet chilli sauce are almost always from my food garden.