If you are making a delicious fried chicken, you will definitely need some chilli sauce on the side, this chilli recipe is a basic go to at any time you want a perfect homemade chilli sauce. One of the advantages of making homemade chillies is you can tailor the taste to your liking. You will start with large red chillies that are mild or you can use the hot ones depending on how hot you may want your chillies to be.

The red chillies will give you the colour and ten texture if you don’t want too much heat on the chillies, you may remove the seeds. Give the chillies a rough chop then place them into a food processor, for the spicy chillies, you can use the bird’s eye chillies, roughly chops them and add them into the food processor.

You will then add some garlic and if you are not a fan then you can leave the garlic out of use a little, give them a chop and place them into the food processor. You are not making a sauce here, you just want to pulse them ingredients and not blend them. Next, you will make the sauce starting with sugar and water into a bowl then add vinegar, salt and fish sauce then add the pulsed chilli mixture.

Let the mixture simmer until the sugar dissolves and the raw edge of garlic has softened and the chilli is starting to get nice and soft. Once the mixture comes to a simmer, turn the heat down a little bit and let it bubble away for about five minutes. To ensure that the chilli sauce has a beautiful thickness, you will mix in a bowl potato starch and water and add the mixture a few minutes when the chilli mixture is almost ready to be removed from the heat.

An alternative of potato starch would be cornflour. Cook, it for a few minutes on low heat while stirring the mixture then turn the heat off and as it cools down, it will thicken a little. Pour into a jar and you can keep it in the fridge for up to three weeks.

Ingredients;

  • 4 (about 100g) long red chillies
  • 3 (about 10g) red birds’ eye chilli
  • 6 garlic cloves (about 30g) garlic, peeled
  • 150ml water
  • 100g white sugar
  • 15ml white vinegar
  • 15ml fish sauce
  • 4g salt
  • 5g potato starch or cornstarch mixed with 5g water

Instructions;

  1. Place chillies and garlic in a food processor and pulse until roughly chopped.
  2. In a large saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the water, sugar, vinegar, fish sauce and salt. Add the chilli and garlic mixture and simmer until sugar dissolves. Then turn the heat down and simmer for 5 minutes to let the flavours develop.
  3. Whisk in the potato starch mixture and gently simmer for another minute.
  4. Allow to cool, then store in a glass jar in the refrigerator.