We love a nice hot sauce. If you look in our fridge, you will find several spicy sauces in the door. But sometimes, it doesn’t have to be that hot. We made a mild salsa that everyone can appreciate.
There is indeed a whole red pepper in this sauce, but the heat drops off considerably during the cooking of the sauce. We promise.
When you finally found a recipe for a mild salsa, they throw in a red pepper after all. And yet, this salsa is really very mild. That’s because we did two things while preparing the sauce.
First, we removed the seeds and the glands from the pepper. It is said that most of the heat of a pepper is in the seeds. But the heat is in the glands. Those are the whiter strands in the pepper where the seeds are attached. If you carefully remove the glands, you will lose most of the heat. You can easily scrape them off with a sharp knife.
Then we cooked the sauce down with a tablespoon of sugar. The sugar absorbs the oils released when the pepper is cooked and thereby neutralizes the heat.
This mild salsa works excellent on enchiladas, burritos, nachos and as a dipping sauce with a bag of tortilla chips. Before you know it, the bottle is emptied, and you have to make it again. No problem, because it takes half an hour of work.
If you made the salsa too, let us know in the comments. Or better! Take a photo and post it on Instagram. Tag @bbq.heroes so we can see what you made.
Ingredients
- 4 large tomatoes
- 1 red chilli pepper
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 1/4 tsp coarsely smoked salt
- juice of half a lemon
- 1 tbsp smoked paprika powder
- 1 tbsp sugar
Instructions
- Cut the tomatoes into quarters and remove the core. That’s the harder piece in the centre.
- Cut the head off the chilli pepper and remove the seeds and glands. Let them sit if you want the sauce a little hotter.
- Cut the garlic cloves slightly smaller.
- Toss everything in a blender and puree into a thin sauce.
- Pour the sauce into a frying pan and add the salt, lime juice, paprika and sugar.
- Stir well and cook the sauce to desired thickness.
