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I just finished breakfast. Two poached duck eggs on toast that had been buttered to within an inch of its life, with some chopped parsely and salt seasoned with chilli and native lime. Oh, and a massive glass of apple juice.
Poaching eggs is one of those topics that this blog now adds to about forty million other blog posts, cook books and gossip notes about. It’s apparently horrifyingly difficult, Larousse Gastronomique’s instructions for it take up two pages with several photos illustrating the various stages. I treat poaching eggs the same way that I treat most things if they are highly finicky and the amount of effort involved threatens to eclipse how much the results are worth it; I cheat.
On Saturday afternoon I caught up with a friend for beers in Surry Hills. After a few hours of drinking and talking technology (will the iPad dominate?) we decided that the only logical thing to do given both of us were hungry and both of us were three quarters drunk, was to go back to his and cook up a storm for the three of us (him, me and my wife).
Still full of confidence after serving it for others at a dinner party last weekend, my mate dictated that dinner ought be agnolloti stuffed with sweet potato and bacon with a butter sage sauce, and beforehand we should snack on salmon tartare tweel cones with red onion and crème fraiche. ”Shounds like a plan”, I said – and got off my stool and swayed towards the door of the bar. We were tired and emotional, and about to go fire up hot ovens and whirling blades in food processors.
What could possibly go wrong?
Piri piri sauce is a particularly hot chilli sauce made from the African bird’s eye chilli. Burgers and wraps, particularly chicken, really have their flavour picked up by the sauce and this may be a motivating factor in why there are now no less than three Portuguese chilli chicken burger chains in Australia which utilise the sauce.
Bird’s eye chilli isn’t easy to find in Australian grocers but any small red chilli will do when making piri piri sauce, including these Thai things that I use in most hot sauces. If you want something to marinate a chicken in, or something to smatter a tablespoon of in a sandwich, wrap or chicken burger, give this a try. Be wary that if your usual chilli sauce is sweet chilli sauce from a bottle, this may be out of your league as it’s much hotter than the fluorescent orange gear.
Making the sauce is not more complicated than roasting the chillies, simmering the ingredients briefly and then blending and straining the results. Leave the seeds of the chilli in the sauce, they’ll be removed when you strain (so they don’t get caught in your teeth) and the white pithy membrane that covers them is what gives chillies their kick so you want that transferred into the sauce.
