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Here is our recipe for Trini pepper sauce, as approved by Ryan! We started with a base recipe we found online that looked like his family’s pepper sauce. Then he taste-tasted and we adjusted the seasonings to make it taste just right.
Due to the large amount of vinegar in this recipe, the pepper sauce will last ages in the fridge. Ryan says that Trini dishes themselves are not too spicy, but pepper sauce is always served alongside to add extra heat. That way, you can add as much or as little as you want! This pepper sauce is great in that it is not only spicy, but it also has great flavour. It’ll add great taste to stew chicken, curry goat, or oxtail.
Our recipe recommends using 10-15 Scotch bonnet peppers. Most Scotch bonnets have a heat rating of 100,000–350,000 Scoville units, meaning that they are extremely hot! If you have a more sensitive palate, use fewer peppers. The pepper sauce recipe uses the whole pepper, seeds included, so it really packs a punch.
Chadon beni, or shadow beni, is a green herb that is quintessential to Trini cuisine. It is also known as ‘sawtooth herb’ and used in Thai cooking. I can only find it sold in the small Caribbean grocery store in Kensington Market here in Toronto. If you can’t find it, you can use cilantro instead, as they have similar flavours.
You’ll also find that the colour and the flavour of the sauce changes after a few days. All the flavours of the individual ingredients meld together, and the colour changes to a more yellow colour, despite using red, orange, and green Scotch bonnet peppers. This is normal! The heat of the Scotch bonnet peppers also mellows a bit, but only a bit. We recommend letting the pepper sauce age for a week in the fridge before using.
Over the holidays, Ryan and I cooked a Trini feast with oxtail, callaloo, pastelles, saltfish buljol, and sorrel. Of course, we had to make this Trini pepper sauce to accompany our feast!
Spread the love by dividing the finished sauce into small jars. Give the jars away to friends who also love Caribbean food and hot sauces!
Trini Pepper Sauce
Ingredients
- 10-15 Scotch bonnet peppers various colours
- 1 seasoning pepper
- 1 head garlic
- 20 leaves chadon beni
- 1 tsp ginger grated
- 3 sprigs fresh thyme leaves removed
- 1 cup white vinegar
- 1 Tbsp salt
- 2 Tbsp mustard
- 3 Tbsp lime juice
Instructions
- Remove stems from peppers. Peel garlic cloves.
- Place garlic, chadon beni, ginger, thyme, and 1/2 cup vinegar in a blender or food processor. Blend til mostly smooth.
- Pour out into a bowl and set aside.
- Place the peppers and remaining 1/2 cup vinegar in the blender. Blend til mostly smooth (you might want to wear goggles to protect your eyes!).
- Pour the blended peppers into the bowl with the garlic paste. Add salt, mustard, and lime juice. Stir well.
- Pour the pepper sauce into small jars and store in the fridge.
Try some of our other Trini recipes:
Due to the pandemic, we haven’t done much travelling recently. However, you can check out photos from our previous trips here.
This looks so good! Following from Fiesta Friday’s.
Oh so many things this would be good on!! Thanks for sharing at the What’s for dinner party. I hope your week is warm and full of smiles!!
I have never heard of this sauce but I do love a variety of different pepper sauces and jellies. I pinned this to give it a try a some point. It looks delicious! Thanks for sharing and linking it.
Shelbee
http://www.shelbeeontheedge.com
This looks amazing! I am featuring it on my Friday Favorites Linky Party. I can’t wait to see what you have for us this week!
OMG! I grew up with this at home, at my grandparent’s house, at any auntie and uncle’s house. Like all of our family recipes they were kept in people’s heads and I was never able to get anyone to write it down for me. The remaining person who could, we’ve lost to dementia so this is extra extra special! Featuring when my party opens up!
My partner’s family is the same…they are amazing cooks but don’t write anything down! I’ve been able to record his dad’s sorrel and punch a creme recipes, but I’m still trying to write down his mom’s black cake recipe!
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I’m not sure if I missed reading it in the description, but what is a seasoning pepper? Thanks!
Hi Nicole! A seasoning pepper is a small sweet pepper that is used to flavour different Trini dishes. I think you could use about a tablespoon of minced regular sweet bell pepper instead. That’s what I do if I can’t find seasoning peppers!
Would it be like a pimento pepper? Thanks for the reply and tip using sweet peppers!
I think a pimento would work perfectly!
To confirm, is it the thyme sprig with no leaves on it that we add, or the thyme leaves that we’ve pulled off?
And are you using prepared yellow mustard or dried mustard?
Thanks so much! I’m eager to make this
Hi Elizabeth,
Use just the thyme leaves, not the woody stems. And the mustard is prepared mustard. But if you only have powdered, that would probably be okay too!
[…] I’ve also omitted the Scotch bonnet pepper to reduce the heat. Since we have a fiery homemade Trini pepper sauce on the table to add heat, I find that I can dial down the spiciness in the green seasoning […]
Chadon beni is also called culantro (that’s culantro with a “u”). If you can wait, age your sauce a couple months in the refrigerator, strain out solids with a mesh strainer. Dilute one half with vinegar. Results are excellent.
Thanks for the tip, it sounds delicious!
Can you use cilantro? If so how much would you use?
Hi Kim,
I think you could replace the chadon beni with equal amounts of parsley and cilantro. So instead of the 20 leaves of chadon beni, you could use 10 leaves cilantro, 10 leaves parsley. Hope this helps!
M
hey, if i want the serving to be for 3 what ingredient adjustments do I make?
Hi Tish,
Are you looking for the servings to be 3 cups, or for 3 people? If for 3 cups, multiply all the ingredients by 1.5. However, if you are looking to just make enough for 3 people for one meal, you’re looking at a total of about 1 tsp of pepper sauce (it’s very potent), and it would be impossible to make a batch this small. You can try using just 1/3 of the ingredient amounts listed to make 2/3 cup total. The good thing about this pepper sauce is that it lasts ages in the fridge, so if you make 2/3 cup, it’ll still last you for months. Hope this helps!
Meinhilde
My son and I grew a couple of Scotch Bonnet plants, and we used this recipe for the first batch of sauce.
It is lovely, and we are going to let it rest for a couple of weeks before we cook bus up shut for dinner with this sauce on the side.
Thanks a lot!
I’m so glad you like it! The heat really mellows and all the flavours marry nicely after a few weeks 🙂