Sweet Rocoto chilli sauce

This is a simple recipe for turning seasonally abundant Rocoto chillies into sweet chilli sauce for convenient, safe and measured year-round use in the kitchen.

Introduction

This recipe started with my first big crops of chillies from my ‘Chilli Tree’ or Rocoto chilli, more correctly Capsicum pubescens that was propagated from collected seeds and shared amongst my family.

“I thought this suspicious name might relate to the heat making one’s hair grow short and curly, but alas, it is referring to the particular plant’s distinctive hairiness of its leaves.”

Me

It produced hundreds of flavoursome fruit with characteristic black seeds. My trees have fruit almost year-round. The ‘heat’ in the fruit is very unevenly distributed so it is easy to ruin a family meal with just part of one fruit. Also, if handled carelessly they will make your skin or eyes feel like they were on fire for hours.

Consequently, I needed a systematic and safe way of preserving this fruit so that the calibrated flavour could be judiciously metered into meals and also be conveniently available for those that want a bit more fire with their food. The recipe is designed for maximum capsicum flavour, not heat, but there is plenty of both.

At first, I was tempted to mix the chillies with other sauce making flavours, but found the simple pure sauce, as in this recipe, to be the best.

Warning: Use gloves and eye protection while; cutting, handling and cooking the chillies and don’t, whatever you do wipe your eyes. “If you are a bloke only have a hands free pee or it will be a pee to remember.” Even after thorough washing, traces of the chilli oil (that have gone through the gloves) will persist in the skin for some time and be a source of grief.

Note 1: The flesh is very hot, sometimes not so hot near the bottom tip. The seed supporting web is somewhat hotter and the black seeds are much hotter still. So, I like fillet out both the web and the seeds for this recipe. However, you can make a super turbo sauce (for a ‘fire-eaters’ pleasure or finding their limit) with the webs, seeds and a little flesh, but don’t let it get mixed up with your regular sauce.

Note 2. The sauce is at its hottest immediately after making. The heat dissipates a little after 6-12 months of storage, but the capsicum flavour and colour persists. Consequently, the sauce is very suitable for making in big batches for long term storage and sharing with friends.

Note3. If you have a young chilli bush, a small crop of chillis can be harvested, filleted then frozen and pooled together with other crops to make a substantial batch of sauce. Fileting after freezing is not very practical.

Rocoto chilli recipe

• 1 kg of filleted chilli flesh with seeds and seed holding web cut out,
• 2 kg sugar,
• Juice of one large lemon or lime,
• 1 cup of vinegar,
• Boil the chilli flesh in a little water until they go soft,
• Transfer the cooked flesh to a blender and blend till the mix is smooth,
• Add ~half of the sugar to the mix in the blender and blend the mix once more (The sugar grains act as a grinding agent),
• Transfer the blended mix back into the boiling pot and add the lemon juice, vinegar and remaining sugar and boil till the desired consistency is achieved (usually when the floating scum starts to stick to the wall of the pot). At this stage, the small pieces of skin (that have not been broken up by the blender) will float to the top and can be removed with a tea strainer along with most of the scum and an occasional escaped black seed,
• Pour into bottles and seal while very hot, remembering to immediately invert the bottles for a few seconds to wet sterilize the inside of the lid with hot sauce,
• Store for six months or more for milder hotness to develop without loss of the rich capsicum flavour.

Horticultural notes: The trees can be propagated from cuttings, but very much more easily from seeds. I select big fruit to collect the seeds and think that this selection improves the fruit size in the progeny. Who knows?

It is good to share seeds with friends and strangers (who may become a friend). The trees are sensitive to heavy frost, so it is good to have some replacement seedling, in reserve, in a frost-protected area, otherwise, you may need to go to your friends for seed/seedlings.

There is a lovely bright yellow equivalent chilli. I find that it is slow to ripen to its final pure yellow colour (in my Gippsland climate), so it is harder to manage and harvest the fruit for a brilliant looking sauce.

The big yellow chilli is another very hot fruit for sauce making. Unfortunately, it’s delayed ripening when compared with the red one makes them vulnerable to frost damage before they can be harvested with full yellow colour.

Addendum

If you enjoyed this post you are probably an adventurous natural foodie and may like my Fig with Fennel Pickle. It is a no-going-back type recipe That’s if you like Fennel! I love fig jam, but probably will never make it again when I can make this tangy tasty pickle as an alternative. It can be used as Jam and it ‘keeps’ much better because of the increased acidity:

Pickled figs with fennel recipe

You may also like some of my other posts:

Other food ideas- a pictorial index of my recipes

Wanderers wild seafood ideas

DIY backpacking meals

Excalibur dehydrator- a robust and effective food drier

Cheap kitchen tricks

Tim