Asian Sweet Chili Sauce

Like the sweet chili chicken sauce in your local Asian grocery store, except by making your own sauce the heat level and consistency can be adjusted to your preference. Great as a marinade, stir-fry sauce, glaze or dipping sauce!

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1/2 cup rice vinegar
3 garlic cloves, minced
5 long red chilies, finely chopped with seeds
2 tbsps cornstarch
2 tbsps cold water

They might be a little awkward to use, but try wearing gloves when chopping the chilies. 

In a saucepan combine sugar, water, rice wine vinegar, garlic and chilies. Bring to a boil, then simmer rapidly for 10-15 minutes. Take about one third of the mixture out and blend with a stick blender then return to the pot.

Mix cornstarch and cold water together and pour into chili mixture while stirring through. Gentle boil 3 minutes.

Remove from heat for 5 minutes. In that 5 minutes you can sterilize your jars.

Stand a piece of cutlery in each jar to help disperse the heat then pour in boiling water. Remove the cutlery, give the sauce a stir and pour into hot jars. Pour boiling water over lids and rings then make sure the rim of the jar is clean and seal with the sterilized lid.

To process jars in a hot water bath:
Place jars in a pot of boiling water enough to cover top of jars. Boil 10 minutes then carefully remove the jars to cool on the  counter. The lids should pop down in the middle overnight. If they don't you'll have to start the process over again. That means putting the sauce back in the pot and heating it up, cleaning and sterilizing jars, re-filling and re-processing in a hot water bath. Or just keep refrigerated.

Note: This recipe is a pretty good copycat of the store bought sweet chili chicken sauce, but if you want to play around with it using hotter chilies will give you a hotter sauce and using more or less cornstarch will give you a thinner or thicker consistency.

Makes about 3 cups