This recipe was given to me by a family friend and it’s amazing. It makes a chili oil base that keeps for a year on the counter and you can do everything with it. I use it for my chilli to replace pure chili powder as it has more flavour.

I call it a chili oil but it’s not just seasoned oil, it’s definitely closer to a spice.

You will need:

• 30 grams of one kind of pepper flakes
• 30 grams of another, flaked too

The point of doing two different types of pepper is that you use a hot one, and a milder one. You don’t want your oil to be entirely spicy, and so the milder pepper will give flavour instead of heat.

I like cayenne pepper for one half, and for the other half really whatever is very spicy that I can find flaked. If you don’t like spice then you can use paprika and milder pepper, for example.

• 250-300 millilitres of oil of your choice
• 8 grams of salt
• 8 grams of toasted sesame seeds
• 1 clove of garlic
• a bit of black pepper, either whole or grounded (we use either differently)
• a mason jar or similar that can hold everything.

Keep in mind you will be getting ~400ml in volume at the end, I actually need to use two jars when I make this because they’re too small to hold everything in just one.

Cut up the clove of garlic pre-emptively. The finer the better, you can even press it in one of those mashers.

Pour the 60g of chilli flakes in a bowl along with the garlic and salt and mix with a spoon until it’s properly homogenous. We will use the sesame seeds at the very end.

Heat up the oil in a sauce pan. There’s not really any suggestion here; I do it with olive oil, my friend does it with canola oil. It will change the taste but whichever oil you prefer is fine.

You can add a few peppercorns in the oil as it heats up if you want, or grind a bit of pepper on the flakes directly.

Don’t bring the oil to its smoking point! This is more difficult with olive oil but basically, once it’s very very hot, take it off the heat and put it back on as needed.

This is the tricky part (it’s not really tricky but it requires care). Once the oil is hot, you will pour just a tiny bit of it in the bowl of chili flakes, and then stir. By “tiny bit”, I mean not even enough to cover the top layer of the bowl. This prevents the garlic and flakes from burning or overcooking.

Pour a tiny bit, put the pan down, and stir with the spoon for several seconds. Be careful with oil as it’s much hotter than water, it just doesn’t boil at the same temperature.

Bring the oil back up to heat if needed, and then pour the same amount on the flakes again.

Essentially repeat that process until you feel there’s enough oil in the bowl – oil is unhealthy in these quantities comrades, so you should definitely cut down on it as much as possible 😉

That’s why I recommend between 250ml of oil to 300ml; it will depend on your ingredients as well as just how much you want in there. If you don’t have enough, you can quickly heat up some more oil as needed; the chilli isn’t going anywhere. I would definitely start at 250ml and work my way up from there.

The consistency of the chilli oil that I prefer is when there is just enough of it to still be stirrable. If you don’t use a lot of oil, the flakes will harden and be difficult to use.

At the end, add the sesame seeds and stir evenly again. The idea is that the sesame seeds are more sensitive to heat, and so we add them at the end to prevent them from burning.

Then wait until it cools down and transfer the contents of the bowl into the jar and close it up.

You can use this oil as is but I find that to really release all the flavours, you should mix it with mayonnaise, which is emulsified fat and thus can dissolve oil. You can probably get low-fat mayo which helps cut down on what is essentially pure calories.

That way it can also be used as a cold sauce.

It works by itself too like on pizza, or in your homemade chilli, but in those cases to me it just tastes very very spicy lol

It keeps for one year in a sealed jar on the shelf, no refrigeration required. Doing this process above lasts me months, it’s very low maintenance and while 300ml of oil sounds like a lot (it is), you only eat one tea spoon at a time.