The other day I had a chilli sauce at a local restaurant which has brought me back to my childhood memory. It was mainly made of red hot chilli and fermented black soybeans. The heat from the chilli and the saltiness with a hint of fermented sweet flavour from the black soybean really create a nice “Bang” on your palette. Just need to make some for my pantry staple.
The main ingredient
Red hot chilli, garlic, fermented black soybean.
My ratio is 2 parts of chili to 1 part of garlic and 0.25 part of fermented black soybeans. So this time I used 4 cups of chopped chilli, 2 cups of chopped garlic and half cup of fermented black soybeans.
Fermented soybean can be found in Asian supermarket OR you can buy it from Amazon.
0.5 litre of cooking oil
1 cinnamon stick, 1 tsp of szechuan peppercorns .
How do I do it?
1. Chop chilli and garlic.
2. Heat up the cooking oil. When the oil gets hot, add cinnamon stick and szechuan peppercorns and cook for 2 minutes. Discard the spices.
3. Add chopped chilli into the heated oil and start cooking followed by garlic and fermented black soybeans. Add 1 tablespoon of Chinese rock sugar and simmer for 30 minutes.
This is what the result looks like. You can taste the nice aromatic garlicky flavour of fermented soybeans followed by a hot and spicy aftertaste. There are many applications for this. You can add a bit vinegar and soy sauce to make dumpling dipping sauce, or just to add the sauce to fried rice or fried noodle. Let me know what else would you do with the sauce. 🙂