Simple Spicy Sweet Chilli Sauce

This simple sweet chilli sauce recipe is perfect for everything from slathering onto bacon sandwiches through stir fry sauces and glazes.

A Simple Chilli Sauce.

I love this recipe, it takes some store cupboard ingredients and mixes them with our crop of chillies to form a really versatile and delicious sauce.

I use it in everything from stir-fries like my chilli beef with noodles through to the sauce for my sesame coated salmon fillet.

It is also my goto sauce to add to a bacon sandwich and it gets used in lots of my glazes.

It is a recipe that requires very little skill other than the patience to prepare the chillies.

Whilst we are on the topic of preparing chillies… If you rub your hands with oil before you start it will prevent the capsaicin from entering your pores.

This means it will wash off when you have finished and no chance of stinging eyes or worse later in the day!

What Chillies to use.

I would not necessarily call myself a chilli connoisseur but I do know that all chillies have different flavours as well as heat levels.

As a result I tend to blend the chillies that I use in the sauce.

Generally speaking, I will mix cherry bomb chilli peppers, with cayenne and a Thai birds eye chillies.

The Cherry bomb peppers are the mildest, roughly the same sort of spice levels as a jalapeno pepper.

I use these for the main body of the sauce and they make up around 65% of my mix. A quarter of my mix is usually cayenne pepper and just 10% Thai birds eye chilli.

A general mild red chilli makes an ideal sub for the cherry bomb peppers. Habanero or Scotch bonnet make a good swap for the Thai birds eye chillies.

How to Vary the Spice.

Tolerance to the spicy chilli heat varies from person to person massively. So, in reality, you will need to work the exact balance to your own tastes.

In fact, that is the true beauty of this recipe, you can make it as hot or mild as you like!

The easiest way to vary the heat is covered above. Simply swapping out a hot chilli for a milder one makes a big change.

However by doing that you are also swapping out flavour.

Removing the seeds and thin membrane from the hotter chillies can also help.

Naturally, most of the heat will remain and it is not a magic bullet. But it will reduce the heat and the intensity of the heat whilst keeping the flavour.

It also makes for a better eating sauce, I will usually remove 50-60% of all of the seeds when I am making this recipe.