Fresh Homemade Hot Sauce or Sambal

 I'm in  a phase right now. Fellow blogger Cheryl  face booked  some cool pictures takes with her I Phone and Hipstamtic and I have been obsessed ever since. I even set up a Tumblr acct to showcase my cool artsy pictures and other stuff that I cant put here. It's that bad.  So I figured I could get some stylized  shots of these Red Chili Peppers to make the feeling of heat even more visible with this analog style of photography via digital means. I love the vintage feel . So you may see this from time to time here. It's a phase I need to work through.

 A few weeks back I received my Culinaria Southeast Asia book and was captivated by the Sambal''s. Sambal's are essentially chili based dipping sauce that precedes what we in the Western world think as as ketchup. Sambal Oelek being the most popular one to come to mind. Some Sambals have shrimp paste, lime, soy, sugar, ginger, garlic, tamarind, peanuts,etc. All sorts of variations exist.

I made my own variation  based on  the Sambal Cuka ( Vinegar and Chili Dip) in Culinaria. I ended up altering things and adding more ingredients. My batch was also larger because I had about 50 or so Chili peppers. I will give you roughly what I did. Taste and alter according to your tastes.This makes a large batch, that's ideal to divide up and bottle to share. Fresh Sauce  keeps for 1 week in the refrigerator.

Fresh Homemade Hot Sauce/ Sambal

(You can scale this down as this makes over 1/4 liter, a rather large batch. You can use minimally 10 red chilies and amounts of 2 tbsp of vinegar, 2 garlic cloves, 1/2 inch ginger, 1 tbsp soy, 1 tbsp sugar)

1/4 lb red chili peppers ( about 50 chili peppers)

 2 inches of fresh ginger root, peeled and cut into small pieces

1/2 fist of garlic. Cloves peeled

1/2 cup white vinegar

1/4 cup sugar

3-4 tablespoons of Soy Sauce

Wash and Stem chilies (wear gloves to protect skin).  Add rest of ingredients. Process with food processor. Store in sealed jar in the refrigerator. Keeps 1 week