Piri Piri Hot Sauce - Curious Cuisiniere (2024)

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Bright lemon and spicy chilies come together in this incredibly versatile hot sauce recipe.

Piri Piri Hot Peppers

Piri Piri (also spelled Peri Peri), or African Bird’s Eye, is a hot pepper grown in mostof Africa. Piri piri is the Swahili word for ‘pepper pepper,’ but after the Portuguese got a hold of it and started making a spicy sauce and marinade which they brought with them around the globe, the termPiri Piri has come to be more commonlyused to refer to any hot sauce made with red chili peppers.

African Bird’s Eye chilies are hot peppers, with their Scoville heat units hitting 175,000. (Compared to the Scotch Bonnet and Habanero whose rating can range from 100,000 to 300,000.)These peppers can be difficult to find in the States, but look for them at your Asian, Hispanic, or Indian markets. Other good substitutions for African Bird’s Eye Chilies would be the Asian Bird’s Eye, Habanero (both of which could be hotter than the African Bird’s Eye), Cayenne, Tobasco, or Serrano (which pack less heat than the African Bird’s Eye).

Making Piri Piri Sauce

An authentic Piri Piri Sauce blends the chilies with lemon, garlic, and herbs, creating a bright, citrus flavored hot sauce with a hint of earthiness from the herbs.

With a few simple ingredients, you create a sauce with an incredibly complex flavor that is wonderful as a marinade for chicken, pork, fish, and shrimp. It also makes a fantastic dip (especially for potatoes) and a greatall purpose hot sauce.

Adjusting Piri Piri Sauce To Your Preference

You can adjust the heat levels of your sauce by the number of chilies you add in. Removing the seeds from the chilies before blending them into the sauce will also cut the heat, while still giving you the robust chili flavor.

This sauce can be made as thick or thin as you like by the addition of olive oil. If you plan touse the Piri Piri Sauce primarily as a hot sauce, you may want a thinner sauce, so you may want to use moreolive oil. If you are using the sauce as a dip or a marinade, you may want to add less oil to create a thick, spreadable sauce.

Preserve Those Peppers!

Making up a batch of this sauce is a great way to preserve the hot peppers and herbs growing in your garden. (And your lemons too, if you’re lucky enough to live in a region where lemons grow locally!)

This sauce will keep for up to a month in your refrigerator. It also freezes well.

If you would like to preserve the sauce by canning, we would recommend only canning it with a pressure canner. The olive oil in the sauce reduces itsacidityto a point where it really needs to be heated through in the way that only a pressure canner can to ensure that it will be pantrystable.

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