If you love garlic and you love spice – and let’s be honest, how could you not? – then you’re surely a sucker for a great spicy garlic sauce. They just go so well with so many things – chicken wings, burgers, mixed into stir fries, with cheese, and so many other things.
There are some great ones you can buy premade from stores, but did you know it’s actually pretty easy to make great ones yourself? We’ve made a list of some of the best recipes around so you can satisfy your spicy garlic cravings – read on!
This is a great all-purpose chili sauce – while it’s primarily intended to be used in cooking rather than as a condiment by itself, you can definitely use it for both. The recipe isn’t anything complicated – the only ingredients are chili peppers, garlic, a little sugar, white vinegar, and salt and pepper.
You can use whichever chili peppers you have available and whatever spice level you’re comfortable with. The result is more like a paste than a liquid, but feel free to enjoy it on whatever you like.
This delicious sauce is specifically made for adding to stir fries and covers all the bases – it’s garlicky, spicy, sweet, and salty! The recipe also helpfully suggests a number of substitutions for those who want to eat gluten-free, and to allow you to use what you have handy rather than going out to get lots of specific ingredients. Even without these substitutions, the sauce is already vegan and only takes around 10 minutes to make.
If you’re not sure what chutney is, it’s a type of condiment that originated in India. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of types of chutney – they can be made using tomatoes, mangoes, coconuts, peanuts and just about anything else you can think of.
They can be sweet, sour, or, like this one, spicy. It’s a recipe that’s decidedly heavy on the garlic and chilies, and the heat from each play so well together. This chutney is delicious on sandwiches and is also an excellent addition to cheese and biscuits.
Aioli is a Mediterranean sauce similar to mayonnaise that uses garlic. This one also uses chili and lime, making it perfect if you want a hint of that fresh citrus kick with your garlic and spice. It’s great for dipping just about anything into – you haven’t lived if you haven’t dipped fried chicken and jalapeño poppers into this stuff.
That said, it’s also great for adding a more interesting layer of flavor to a burger as well, and we’re sure you’ll be able to think of multiple uses for it when you taste how great it is.
This recipe uses Kashmiri red chilies. These are not all that spicy as far as chilies go, but they have a wonderful, deep, red color, which is often used to add color to dishes like curries. They also make for a great relatively mild chili sauce in their own right.
It’s another one that can be used both in cooking and as a condiment. You could even try using it as a glaze when barbecuing.
If you’re a fan of hot sauces, you must know the famous Huy Fong brand sriracha sauce. However, with the famous name comes a price tag to match. It’s not ridiculous, but it’s also not that hard to make a copycat yourself if you want to have fun and save a little money.
This recipe, like Huy Fong’s, uses red jalapeño peppers, which might be a little difficult to find – try Mexican food stores or markets. It’ll be very spicy when freshly-made but will cool down as time goes by. Use it like you’d use Huy Fong sriracha – it’s great with noodles, fish, and all kinds of other things.
Yes, that sharp intake of breath you just took was completely appropriate. The Carolina Reaper has a notorious reputation as one of the spiciest chili peppers in the world, around 20 times hotter than a habanero and 100 times hotter than a jalapeño. This sauce only includes two reapers in the whole recipe, so it’s fairly manageable. Still, it’s not a sauce to be taken lightly.
The garlic and the other ingredients like the chipotle, lime, turmeric, and so on serve to balance the flavor somewhat. Be careful when you’re making it – wash your hands after you’ve touched the peppers and do touch any sensitive areas of your body until you have, unless you want to discover the real meaning of the word ‘pain’.
Yep, it’s another sauce with those notorious reapers in it. This one is quite different, though. In this recipe, the chilies are roasted, which adds a wonderfully smoky taste to the salsa. The sauce is definitely very spicy but not so much that the other flavors are drowned out – you should still be able to taste a pleasant garlicky note in it, as well.
You can use it for whatever you’d usually use salsa for – if you have guests that are into spice as well, you can use it to make a plate of nachos that they’re never going to forget!
Chiu Chow originated in the city of Chaozhou, in Southern China’s Guangdong province. It’s somewhere between a sauce and a chili oil but, apart from chili, the essential ingredient is garlic, and lots of it. Next most important is soy sauce, to add saltiness and plenty of umami.
When we say lots of garlic, we mean it. his recipe calls for two whole heads of garlic – not cloves, heads. When you’ve made it, it will look like a thick, oily paste that’s great for cooking and for adding to whatever else you fancy.
This sauce is traditional in Argentina and Uruguay, where it’s a common accompaniment to all kinds of meats and fish. There is a story that the name comes from an Irishman named Jimmy McCurry who fought in the war of Argentinian independence.
Linguists, however, think it’s more likely to come from the Basque word tximitxurri, which means “mixture”. Wherever the name comes from, it’s a wonderfully fresh tasting recipe with prominent garlic and spice to make any kind of meat or fish come alive.
You can crank up the garlic and chili or play them down depending on how much you think you can take.
