Nonnie's Blog: How to create amazing chilli sauces

After all this time of experimenting, making chilli sauces - as once I began growing chillies, I was hooked - I now know the general strategy for creating an easy, but the best ever, chilli sauce!

In short, you cut up all the ingredients which must involve tomatoes (fruit component), chillies (the heat), garlic and onion, and the best sauce has another sweet fruit as well like fejoia, guava. All ingredients are coated with a vegetable oil like olive oil, with the tomatoes I baste them with a silicon brush across the top, but with the onion and garlic I shake around in a bowl. I use pink Himalayan salt, pepper, and some curry powder across the top of the tomatoes, sugar across the sweet fruit - and bake them until really roasted well, then blitz them with some apple cider vinegar and sugar, boil for 5 min or so, then bottle.

I hate boiling now, as I feel baking or roasting preserves more nutrients - and love making soup in the same way now - roasting pumpkin with garlic and onion, all oiled, then blitzing. Why would you want to boil something in water, then pour off the vitamins and nutrients in the water?!!!

I recently created a really successful one that we all love. This is what I wrote about it on Insta:

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The sauce is warm and has heat, it dances on the palette so thus the name A Midsummer's Night Dream, recalling the heat of a warm summer wind.

I measure the recipe by large baking trays; it made 5 various size bottles (reused jam or pasta sauce bottles). I baked the ingredients in the trays at 160 C fanbake until very cooked looking, and on baking paper so I could dump out the contents after grilled:

1 full size baking tray with quartered juicy (low acid) roma tomatoes (the two bags of tomatoes in the photo below), which I had basted along tops of tomatoes with oil, salted with pink Himalayan salt, sprinkled with curry powder and pepper

1 full size baking tray with cut up 1 huge onion (shook with oil), 1 bunch of garlic cloves peeled (same oiled), and a bunch of little tomatoes cut up from my garden

1 small tray (1/3 sized) of fejoia flesh scooped out, sugar sprinkled over, baked - probably 10-12 fejoias scooped out

THE HEAT: 2 full size baking trays of long, green chillies, deseeded, some were jalapenos, also oiled

I put grilled contents into a large metal bowl with a plate as lid until next day to finish off as prepping is alot of work (especially chillies, and MUST wear gloves, I wear gardening ones so I can wash them and reuse). The next day I blend with stick blender, and some sugar (to taste) and a few cups vinegar (until saucey), then boil for a few minutes and bottle, reusing clean jars that I had put in oven at 100 C to sterilise.

Then I label! After tasting it...

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