Chile sauce
Pete’s Mexican chile sauce:
Sweet and mild
(dulce y un poco picante)
3 lbs of fruit: two or three big cooking apples, four tomatoes, three big bell peppers and two small hot chile peppers .
3 pints water
3 lbs sugar
Chop up the fruit, core and all and put in pressure cooker with water. Cook for 15 minutes. You can use a big pan instead and boil for 30 minutes ‘til mushy.
Take mushy fruit out and put through a food mixer. Put back in pan with liquid and sugar and boil for 30 or 40 minutes ‘til it reduces to thick sauce, stir now and again.
The hot peppers decide the heat (picante) so you can put more or less. You can use chile powder instead. Or if you have some sauce or paste that is too hot, use some of that in your chile sauce. You can replace the tomatoes with more apples or bell peppers. The idea is to make the chile sauce with what fruit is available, from someone’s garden.
Use a funnel to pour chile sauce into your old vodka or wine bottles, cleaned with boiling water. Or you can put the chile sauce in sterilised jars and use a spoon.
Sweet chile sauce is very popular these days and that’s why I use big 75 cl bottles. Chile sauce goes with everything. Mild chile sauce is more popular than hot, whatever the young lads say about ‘it’s not hot enough’. Because you have sterilised the bottles, the chile sauce will last for a long time because the sugar keeps it from going off.
I don’t advise putting garlic in your chile sauce because the flavour goes funny – don’t know why, but it loses its appeal. Remember, in Mexico they keep things simple, so this chile sauce would normally be cooked in a big pan over a fire with everything chucked in – there is no clever method about it. And anyway, they use Salsa Roja or Salsa Verde with their food and they don’t contain sugar. Here is the recipe:
Salsa Roja
Chop tomatoes, chiles, onions and a herb, like parsley. Mix it up and put in a bowl to spoon into your tacos.
I haven’t given quantities for the salsa roja because the amount of chiles you put into it depends on how hot – picante – you like it. Si usted le gusta chile muy picante, hacer mas chile en la salsa.
The only dish I have tasted in Mexico that uses anything sweet is Mole Poblano, which is a chocolate and chile sauce usually served with chicken. And the chocolate is not really sweet because they don’t put loads of suger in it (nor animal fat like Cadbury does), so it’s pretty savoury really.
Mole Poblano is delicious and everyone I cook it for loves it – especially if they like curry and other hot food. You serve it with tortillas which are easily made with corn or you can buy them in some places (no-one uses wheat for tortillas in Latin America).
If you want the recipe for Mole Poblano please contact me at peterhobday@gmail.com
Peter Hobday
P.S. I have spelt it ‘chile’, because that is the Spanish spelling and why on earth use English when we don’t even have a word for ‘picante’ which is the word spicy hot (rather than hot to the touch.)
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