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If you are like me and Rob, you will probably have a herb garden loaded with a big variety of different plants and veggies. Now that summer has left, and the harvest is decreasing, you may find that you are left with a glut of chillies about to rot on the trees.

Now we use a lot of chillies in our cooking, but even we can’t consume the numbers that the trees have been producing. So instead of picking them and throwing them in the compost, my son decided to make us a chilli sauce.

Now we had bottles of Franks Red Hot Chilli sauce, Mark Zuckerberg’s favourite Sweet Baby Rays and Flying Goose Chilli Sriracha Hot Sauce in our fridge but none of these come close to my son’s creation. It was a bit ad hoc but came out a treat. We had HEAPS of chilis (probs 50 or 60) so it was definitely worth the effort. I will share it with you ;

NOTE – Volumes and quantities are really dependent on taste preferences i.e. you can make them into say a chilli sauce or chilli paste/jam ….

Ingredients.

• Chillies
• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Garlic (fresh or crushed)

Optional Ingredients (but recommended);

• Capsicum (red)
• Carrots

Later ;

• Vinegar
• Water

So quantities ……. You want roughly equal volumes of chili to tomato/onion/garlic. So if you have a kilo of chillies, you should aim for a kilo of a mix of tomatoes/onion/garlic and carrots (if desired)

1. Char grill all the ingredients on the BBQ or griller all at the same time (also refer footnote 1). Keep the chilies whole, but thinly slice all the other ingredients. You want your chilies (and capsicums) to pretty much burn on one side but remain soft and juicy inside.
2. Take it all off the griller and place in a large pot.  
3. Add vinegar and water (used to preserve the mix) and boil down. Stir while its boiling to get a nice slushy consistency.  
4. Then using a hand blender beat it to the desired consistency.

We wanted a sauce (that we put in an old sauce bottle), so we then pushed the blended pulp to a liquid and pushed it through a strainer.

Footnote 1. A nice variant to this recipe was to create a smoky sauce. The only difference was to cook the peppers/capsicum etc in a smoker. Place the ingredients on a tray over aluminium foil so they don’t fall through your grates and set them into the smoker. Leave them in the smoker until they soften and char slightly (that charred flavour really makes the sauce)

Happy eating.