Author: divydovy

For the first few years I didn’t grow anything. I bought scotch bonnet mash online, worked from Tom’s recipe, and made batches for friends and family whenever the mood took me. Papaya, rhubarb, mango chutney, blackberry vinegar, I went through flavours the way some people go through hobbies, labelling jars by hand and giving most of them away.

We moved to Portugal in 2022. The sauce-making carried on exactly the same way, mash from a jar, recipe from Tom, nothing fermented, nothing grown. It would be a few more years before that changed.

A colleague called Tom brought chilli sauce into the office where we worked in Brighton. Everyone raved about it. For some reason I didn’t try it for months.

When I finally did, I was hooked straight away. I wanted to make some myself, so I asked Tom how, and he did something generous: he gave me his family’s secret recipe.

That was early 2020. I’ve been making chilli sauce in some form ever since. Tom’s recipe is still in there somewhere, six years and a lot of tinkering later.