Is this the final hot sauce? Not sure yet! This one will blow your head off. It’s adapted from a recipe in Big Flavours of the Hot Sun  by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby. This is one of my all-time favourite cookbooks for spice. I bought it on sale at Barnes and Noble in Dallas in 1996. It’s a killer. Also, The Thrill of the Grill. These guys are the best.

In the book, this recipe is called Home-Style Inner Beauty Hot Sauce and comes with several warnings!

Here’s my adaptation:… 

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Here’s chill sauce #5. It’s from the Guardian website and the link is here (recipe at the bottom of the page).

I’ve only made one and a half bottles. I was searching on jerk sauces and ended up here, maybe because of the reference to Jamaica. (I must add that I’m going to try the cauliflower recipe tomorrow night.)

Anyway, because I bought several cans of mangoes, I wanted to used them up. Plus fruit, chilli and mustard! What can go wrong?

Well, I hope this improves because it tasted a bit ordinary. With most of these sauces I want to punch up the brown sugar and vinegar.

Hot sauce #4 is going to be a lacto-fermented sauce using this recipe from the Great British Chefs’ website.

I’ve used up the rest of the bonnet peppers which are quite variable in heat. I’ll post some more photos as the fermentation develops.

I’m really enjoying learning about pickling and fermenting. We possibly have more pickles than we will ever eat.

So, a week and a bit later, we ended up with one and a half bottles. It has a mildly funky taste and is excellent.

It’s worth saying here that the recipe called for 800g chillies and I had only 320g. However I used the full amount of the other ingredients for flavour.

But when I got to the blitzing stage I removed some of the garlic and spice so they wouldn’t be overpowering, and they were in fact a bit too strong.

Nevertheless, this stuff is easy to make and really gives an interesting edge to a chilli sauce.

I’ll follow up with a post about my two fermenting tools.

So far I’ve made three hot sauces, with more on the way.

Tropical Chipotle Sauce – see previous post here.

Green Papaya Chilli Sauce
This is an uncooked sauce, which apparently can be stored in the fridge for up to six months. I put half a dozen of my red bonnet peppers in it, not the 12 they suggest. The peppers seem to quite variable in heat, and the sauce wasn’t super-hot, but it has heaps of garlic. Recipe here.

Habanero and Pineapple Sauce
This is my favourite so far. It has turmeric, allspice and cinnamon which work surprisingly well. I used one habanero and 4 or 5 of the bonnet peppers. The recipe says “perfect with chicken wings” and I reckon it will be! Recipe here.

I’m going to make a Caribbean-style jerk sauce next. I also bought several tins of mangoes as the fresh one haven’t been available down here since Easter. So there’ll be more tropical sauces, that’s for sure. Stay tuned