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Spanish Chili Sauce

A tomato and pepper sauce seasoned with garlic, onions, sugar, salt, and optional benzoate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Spanish Chili Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Chop the tomatoes, red peppers, garlic, and onions finely.

  2. Put the mixture into a kettle and add the salt and benzoate.

  3. Cook for 20 minutes, then bottle the sauce.

Bottle and preserve

  1. If not using benzoate, process the sauce for preservation.

  2. Process ½ pint bottles for 50 minutes at 190°F (88°C) and pint bottles for 1 hour.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the bulk of the sauce and supply its body, moisture and tangy flavour.
Red peppers
Add sweet, fruity flavour and colour to the sauce.
Onions
Contribute savoury depth and aroma as they soften during cooking.
Garlic
Adds sharp, pungent aroma that mellows with cooking.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the tomatoes.
Benzoate
Acts as a preservative, slowing the growth of spoilage microbes so the sauce keeps.

The step that matters

Processing the bottles. Without benzoate, the sauce relies on heat processing to keep. Bottle size changes how long the heat takes to reach the centre, so the time given for each size must be followed exactly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, garlic, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Eggplantfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, garlic, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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