My partner is a chili fiend.  Hotter the better.  One of his favourite breakfasts is a poached egg with chilli sauce. He will put chilli on practically anything.

We have chillis in the garden, lots of them, but he spotted a bottle of chilli sauce at a market, labelled “Warning – very, very hot chillies”, so of course he had to take up the challenge.

And of course then I had to take up the challenge of reproducing it.

This is straight hot sauce – just chilies, vinegar and salt. Depending how hot your chillies are, it can be anything from magma to mildly spicy.  Its simplicity is its strength – you can add it to anything without muddying flavours.

The Recipe

It’s hardly worth a recipe.

Halve your chillies and remove some or most of the seeds.  Use gloves, or really really remember not to touch your face for hours afterwards. The seeds make it hotter, but I find that leaving all of them in gives it a bit too much bitterness.

Put them in a blender and cover with vinegar. I just use plain white vinegar, but it won’t matter what kind you use. Blend until it is semi-smooth – you want a little bit of texture in hot sauce.  Add half a teaspoon of salt for each cup of blend.

Pour the mix into a slow cooker, or into a non-reactive pot on a very low heat, and cook for as long as you like till it is thick and reduced.  Don’t use an aluminium or cast iron pot – the vinegar will pick up a metallic taste.  Use pyrex or enamel or stainless steel for anything with a lot of acid.

While the chillies are cooking, sterilize some bottles.  I would have used little, screw top bottles if I had any.  Because it is preserved in vinegar, the sauce doesn’t need hot bathing afterwards so you don’t need pop-in lids, and it will be used as a pour or drip on sauce. Sterilize bottles by boilingfor 15 minutes, or by pressure cooking for 5 minutes.  Or, if you have a microwave you can use that.

When it is the right consistency, taste your sauce and adjust the salt to taste.  Bottle in your sterilized bottles.  If the bottles and lids are sterile, it should last on the shelf for many months.

The last post I did about olives in 2013, we were having to pick them green to beat the birds. Maybe it’s because our trees are a bit more mature and the olive harvest is bigger. Maybe it’s because climate change is bringing the harvest forward a little. Maybe it’s because the rainforest trees are bigger and native figs are in season too.  The last few years though I’ve been able to harvest them fully ripe.  We’ve just started picking this year’s olives but it looks like there will be a good year’s supply for us and enough to give away again this year.

Olives are easy to process.  You just have to allow them time.  I pick them over to remove any damaged ones, then put them in big glass jars and cover with water and drain and change the water every day for a fortnight.  This is the work part. The rest is mostly just waiting.

Make up a strong brine – one-third of a cup of salt to each litre of water – and soak them in that for three months.  The only hard part in that is stopping them floating in the brine, for which you need something heavy that will fit inside the jar to push them down.  I have some little ceramic saucers that do the job nicely.  After three months, I drain off the brine and cover them with olive oil, some jars with some preserved lemon, chili, garlic, or herbs added.  They are good at this stage, but it takes another month or two to get to superb.

I have very few insect pests that really annoy me.  The payoff for a very wildlife friendly garden is that insects have to run a gauntlet of lizards and frogs and wrens and spiders, and not enough make it through to be serious competition.  Except for flea beetles.   These are little black jumping beetles from the Chrysomelidae family.  They eat holes in the leaves, only eggplants and potatoes in my garden, but so prolifically that the leaves look like lace.  On its own, even that probably wouldn’t faze me, but they also spread wilt and blight diseases and nine times out of ten my eggplants succumb to something before bearing a decent crop.

Rock  mulching the plant to attract and provide habitat for lizards helps a bit.  Surrounding seedlings with well developed Thai basil and other strong camouflage plants helps a bit.  I’ve read that planting a catch crop of radishes works but the flea beetles are fast and they jump, so I haven’t figured out how you would catch the beetles once the radishes have attracted them.  I’ve read that yellow sticky traps work, and I can see that, but I worry about catching beneficial insects too.  I’ve read that mulching with coffee grounds works, but I suspect it works by caffeine poisoning the beetles, and that would poison beneficials too so I might try it but carefully.

Meanwhile, red square eggplants don’t resist the beetles any better than any other variety I’ve tried, but they resist the resulting wilt and blight diseases.  So I have red eggplant bushes with colander leaves but they are still bearing a good crop.

Peeled, the red eggplants work in just about any eggplant recipe.  They are a bit more bitter and I tend to pick them green, just as the colour turns for most recipes.  Unpeeled and fully ripe, they work brilliantly in an Indian style eggplant pickle.

The Recipe:

• Chop 6 cups, or about a kilo (2 pounds) of red eggplant into 1.5 cm cubes.
• Put it in a colander and massage through about 6 dessertspoons of cooking salt.
• Let it sit for half an hour in the sink.
• Put some jars on to sterilize, either  in a pressure cooker for 5 minutes, or by boiling for 15 minutes, or in a slow oven for 20 minutes (but boil the lids separately or the plastic lining melts).  You can also use a dishwasher or a microwave so they say but I don’t have either of them.  You want to put the hot pickle into hot jars so time it so both are ready at once.

Meanwhile

• Finely chop a whole corm of  garlic, and about the same amount of fresh ginger and fresh turmeric.
• Also finely chop some chilies.  How many depends on how hot you like your pickles and how hot your chilies are.  I used half a cupful of bishops crown chilies, without the seeds, which makes a spicy but not heroic pickle.
• Rinse, drain and squeeze the eggplants.
• Heat ¾ cup light olive oil in a pot big enough to take all the eggplants
• Add 1 teaspoon each of fenugreek seeds, cumin seeds and fennel seeds, and a half teaspoon of brown mustard seeds.
• Cook for about half a minute, then add the garlic, ginger and turmeric.
• Cook for another half a minute or so, then add the chilies.
• Cook for minute or so then add the eggplants.
• Cook for a few minutes, then add a cup of vinegar and a heaped dessertspoon of brown sugar.
• Simmer for about an hour, stirring occasionally, till the eggplants are soft and translucent and the oil is separating.  You can tell when it is ready because the oil becomes visible. Leave a ladle to cook in the pot so that it is sterile too.
• Bottle the hot pickle into the hot jars using the ladle, wipe the edge of the jars with a clean paper towel, and put the lids on.  The lids will pop in as it cools.
• The pickle will last for months in the fridge.  If you want to keep on the shelf, or give away, you can go the extra step of boiling or pressure cooking the sealed jars (boil for 20 minutes, pressure cook for 10 in a pot with a tea towel in the bottom to stop the jars rattling).

It has been a great year this year for Davidson plums.  We planted dozens of them as part of our riparian rainforest regen project from 2000 to 2003.   I don’t know whether it is just because they have now hit their stride, or if the unusually wet spring has something to do with it, but this year they have been laden.

There’s quite a lot of edible plants native to my part of the world but not so many of them that are abundant and really delicious.  The range that I look at from my bedroom window goes all the way up to the Bunya Mountains in Queensland along ridgelines. It was likely a route that Bundjalung people took to travel to festivals and feasts, and Bunya pines (Araucaria bidwillii) grow well here, so it is a bit strange that they don’t seem to have been naturalised. We have feasting quantities planted but you couldn’t really call them a native bush food.

But macadamias (Macadamia tetraphylla) and Davidson plums ( Davidsonia jerseyana) are endemic to right here, real bush foods.  We have re-established populations now that should reproduce on their own (climate change allowing) and provide foraging for generations to come. That’s a nice feeling.

The plums are sour, so sour that your eyes cross, but they cook up into the most glorious fruity and aromatic and tart jams and sauce and syrup.  They contain really high levels of anthocyanins, phytonutrients that are really strong antioxidants, and lutein which is one of the compounds that gives kale it’s reputation.  They are also a good source of a good range of minerals – potassium,  zinc,  magnesium, calcium, and of  vitamin E and folate.  All of which is probably necessary to counterbalance the amount of sugar they need to become delicious.

We’ve picked buckets, and there is probably one more pick still to go, distributing the seeds back down into the rainforest gullies.  Enough jam – we’ve eaten way more than we should, I’ve given it away, had people over for pancakes and plum jam breakfasts, even sent some to my son in Vanuatu – which was ridiculous in postage costs but so nice to be able to do – and I still have a year’s supply on the shelf.

This batch went into sauce.  Enough sauce. It is very very good – sweet/salty/sour/spicy with strong and complex flavours, a little goes a long way and I have bottles of it.

Then a batch into syrup for cordial and marinades and granola and over ice-cream.  Enough syrup.  I made it not overly sweet, to my own taste, but perhaps I should have made it sweeter and I’d have a chance of getting through it with a batch of kids at the beach.

For the next batch, I’m considering trying to make salted plums, like umeboshi plums or saladitos.  Anyone tried anything like that with Davidson plums?

The Recipe: Davidson Plum Sauce

This recipe makes about 1.2 kg, or litres of sauce. You can easily halve it if that’s too much.

You need a big non-reactive pot (stainless steel or enamel or pyrex).

Put a saucer in the fridge or freezer.

You need 5 cups of plum pulp.  I find it easiest to remove the two seeds by just squishing the ripe plums and feeling for them. Then blend or process the plums, skin and all, to your desired consistency.  I like it best when it is a bit chunky, not too smooth.

Put the pulp in the pot with:

• 2 ½ cups brown sugar
• ½ cup vinegar
• ½ cup water
• 1 teaspoon garam masala
• 3 cardamom pods
• 3 star anise pods
• 2 teaspoons salt
• a thumb of ginger grated fine
• 3 or 4 cloves of garlic crushed
• chillies chopped fine to taste.  I only have green Bishops Crown chilies ready yet, so I used half a dozen of them.

Cook at a gentle boil for around half an hour stirring occasionally.  Put a ladle in the pot so that it sterilizes too.  Test it every so often by putting a spoonful out onto the cold saucer.  It is ready when it reaches a nice syrupy consistency, still pourable but not liquid.

While it is boiling sterilize some jars or sauce bottles.  Depending on how narrow the neck of your sauce bottles is, you may need to sterilize a jug too.  You can sterilize easily in a pressure cooker for 5 minutes, or by boiling for 15 minutes, or in a slow oven for 20 minutes (but boil the lids separately or the plastic lining melts).  You can also use a dishwasher or a microwave so they say but I don’t have either of them.  You want to put the hot sauce into hot jars so time it so both are ready at once.

Ladle the hot sauce into the hot jars and put the lids on straight away.

It will keep like that for a long time, the sugar and vinegar preserving it, and it will be much too acidic for any food poisoning bacteria.  If you want to make a whole year’s supply, or if you are worried, you can go the extra step of boiling or pressure cooking the sealed jars (boil for 20 minutes, pressure cook for 10 in a pot with a tea towel in the bottom to stop the jars rattling).