Not sure how I have got this far into the blog without hot sauce.

I can eat it for breakfast, lunch and supper. I use it as a base ingredient for many other recipes – yes, with chili but also breakfast, barbecue pork and beans or tortillapatis. Doesn’t taste anything like the bottled varieties – just hot sunshine on a plate (corn chip). Everyone has their own personal recipe, cooked or raw, mild or scorchio, but if you need somewhere to start look no further.

In British supermarkets you are lucky to find 3 types of fresh chili, bagged up in packets of three or four, usually labelled red, green and bird’s eye. The first two are likely to be Jalapeño. Contrast this to San Antonio, Texas, where the entire back wall of a local HEB supermarket was festooned with dozens of different varieties. I remember standing and just staring, as one might at Saturn, or the Coliseum in Rome, or a bear and her cubs on an Alaskan river.

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Ingredients: 500g assorted fresh tomatoes, quartered (cherry tomatoes may be whole). 2 bell peppers, a selection (3 or 4) of chilis, depending on your tolerance they could be anywhere from Jalapeño to Habanero (100X hotter, so only one needed), but I’d start at the low end of the Scolville scale to begin with. Small bunch of fresh coriander, salt.

Other times, as here, I roast the peppers and chilis over a flame until the skin chars, then wait for them to cool down and rub off the char, then continue as above.

So get busy, make some hot sauce, light the barbie, cook some meat or fish or corn, put on Herb Alpert and enjoy the summer.