RECIPE - Home-made chili-pepper sauce (pimenta)

This is really more a how-to post, than a true recipe. The ingredients and quantities vary so much that it's impossible to write a traditional-style recipe. However, it's very easy to explain, and extremely easy to make. The resulting sauce, pimenta, can be used on the stove to spice up food as it's being cooked, or it can stand on the table to allow diners to add to their own taste. It's inexpensive, and it lasts forever without spoiling.

First, you need to collect the ingredients and materials. You'll need about 1/2 lb. (500 gr.) of one or more varieties of small, hot chili peppers. What's available to you will depend on your own market sources in your city. For the sauce in the photos in this post, I used two chili peppers available locally here in Fortaleza - malagueta and camurim. The vendor I bought the chilis from at Fortaleza's central market, Sao Sebastiao, recommended combining these two, as the malagueta would provide the heat, and the camurim would provide the aroma and flavor. You'll also need some small glass bottles, suitable for the size of the chilis. I used recycled Worcestershire sauce bottles, but almost any kind will work. And last, you'll need some liquid to cover the chilis in the bottle. The liquids used most commonly in Brazil are vinegar (white or wine) or cachaça, Brazil's sugar-cane based liquor. I chose cachaça.

In preparing the pimenta, it's best to use rubber gloves whenever handling the chilis. Wash the chilis thoroughly, then pull off the stems, leaving the chilis whole. Pack them into the bottle, filling it completely. Then add the liquid to cover, and cap the bottle. Let stand at least 3 days for flavor to develop before using. As the pimenta is used at the stove or table, the liquid can be replenished.

Incidentally, pimenta makes an excellent gift for a holiday, or as a host/hostess present at a dinner party.

Pimentas and Pimenta

The Portuguese word pimenta is used to refer both to the family of plants that are called chilis or chili peppers in English, and to the table-top sauce made from the fruits of these plants. It's a bit like the situation in English where tabasco is the name of a particular species of chili pepper AND the name of the sauce made from this pepper.

Brazilian food, contrary to what many people believe, is not necessarily spicy and hot. Certain regional cuisines, indeed, are very spicy - Bahian food, or Amazonian food. In other regions in Brazil food normally comes to the table unspiced. However, whether in a restaurant or at home, a bottle of pimenta stands in the middle of the table, like salt and pepper might in North America, ready to be used by any one who wants to spice up a dish on their plate. If it's not on the table at a restaurant, it can always be obtained on demand.

A tremendous number of different chilis are grown in Brazil, and the taxonomic confusion is enormous. The same pepper might have two different names in different regions - or two totally unrelated peppers might share a single name. To add to the confusion, some common Brazilian chilis are also used in other national cuisines, but with different names.

For instance, one of the most common hot chilis in Brazil is called the malagueta. In Portugal, and in Portuguese-speaking Africa, it's called peri-peri or piri-piri. In Asia, it's known as the birdseye pepper or the Thai chili, and in North America it's our familiar Tabasco.

There are literally hundreds of other common names for chilis in Brazil. We'll be exploring some of them in this blog.

If you would like to make a Brazilian-style pimenta at home, it's very easy. The instructions are in the following post.