I’m embarking on my 3rd batch of this sauce since the summer, it has definitely become the sauce of choice in our household.

This fruity recipe will make what most people would consider to be a hot West Indian or Belize-style sauce. Some aficionados will think it is a little weak though, so there is no harm in adding more chillies, even doubling or tripling the number of chillies used without changing the quantities of the other ingredients.

Ingredients

200g mango
100g grated carrot (preferably small or
baby carrots)
100g white onion, chopped
50g white sugar
5 x orange or yellow habanero or scotch
bonnet chillies
150ml water
200ml cider vinegar
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1cm cube fresh ginger, chopped
½ tsp salt

Method
Use baby carrots if you can get hold of them, or at least small ones that aren’t woody and tough. If you are using fresh mango, remove the flesh and chop it into pieces. One large mango should do, but buy two just in case, you can eat the leftovers. You can alternatively use a tin of mango pieces; if you do so, use the stuff tinned in juice rather than syrup, a
400g tin should give you just over 200g of flesh with a few pieces left as a snack.
Chop the onion, garlic, ginger and chillies and grate the carrot. Add to a pan with the salt, water, mango pieces, vinegar and sugar. Bring to the boil and simmer with the lid on for about 30 minutes. Keep an eye on it, don’t let the mixture boil dry or thicken beyond a watery slush, add a little more water if need be.
The mango should break down quite quickly, and eventually the onion will soften too. Transfer to a blender and blend this
mixture to a smooth thick creamy liquid. Alternatively use a stick blender to do this in the saucepan. Don’t be shy, you are after a perfectly smooth finish and you can’t blend it too much; the more you do it the less likely the sauce is to separate into solid and liquid. If you use a separate blender, rinse your saucepan while it is empty, you will be returning the mixture to boil again so you need to make sure that stray lumps don’t mess up your smoothness. You may find there are some persistent stringy mango threads too, so remove these using a fork, they probably won’t break down much further and will only clog up your bottles.
If the liquid looks too thick, you can add a little extra water during the final simmer. You then need to bottle it in sterilized bottles, clean them, boil them in water for 10 minutes, then drain them. There are lots more tips and instructions on bottling and sterilization in my ‘Cooking Chillies’ Book, together with other hot sauce recipes.