Bottled Sweet Chilli Sauce
Sweet Chilli Sauce is one of those things that we always have on hand in the fridge. It can spice up any number of dishes. Recently we ran out and decided that, since we constantly have more chillies ripening in our garden than we and everyone we know combined can eat (not much is as prolific in my backyard as those chilli plants) we’d try to make our own.
One of many chilli plants
Why haven’t we been doing this forever? It’s so simple, almost free and we can customise it to suit our taste. Which means I’m warning you to take this recipe with a grain of salt: more or less chilli, sugar/honey and vinegar can (should) be used to suit you. And if you get it wrong, just add more of whatever you want and cook it all a bit more until you love it.
Here’s the sweet chilli sauce recipe we ended up making. It produced in excess of 2 bottles of sauce.
1) Chop finely (we used a mini-food processor):
- 60 grams of red chillies
- 2 centimetres of ginger
- 2 cloves of garlic
2) Put the chopped hot stuff (watch out for the hot oils rising off this mix when you open your food processor, it brings tears to your eyes) in a pot with:
- 1 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup honey (or just sugar)
- 1 cup water
- 1 cup vinegar
- dash of salt
3) Cook on low for 30 minutes.
4) Add 1 – 2 teaspoons of cornstarch with a bit of water (to make a paste) and cook for another 2 minutes. At the end your chilli flakes should remain suspended in the translucent sauce.
5) Pour (maybe let it cool a bit first) into clean, sterile bottles.
This should keep for a year but I would suggest making small batches (we are giving our 2nd bottle away) so storage isn’t an issue. Keep in the fridge after opening.
Yum, yum, yum.
Laura Rittenhouse's Gardening Journal 
This is a really good, simple idea and sounds delicious! Over the past year or so, I’ve tried to cut down on the amount of sauces we buy because they’re so expensive and usually very unhealthy, plus they take up a lot of valuable fridge space! I’ll definitely have to try this next time out chili sauce runs out! I wonder if this is something that would potentially freeze well?
It is easy and pretty quick so you can whip it up in the morning for use that night. I have no idea about freezing. Something makes me think that it would freeze okay but then, when thawed, maybe the texture would be different? Maybe one day I’ll try – or you give it a go and let me know!