Peri Peri Sauce or Piri Piri Sauce

We just recently heard about Peri Peri Sauce (also called Piri Piri Sauce). Peri peri means "a very hot sauce made with red chili peppers. The word Peri means pepper so the sauce is basically called pepper pepper. So yes, this is hot!!!! 🌶🌶

Peri Peri Origin

According to Wikipedia, "peri-peri is a foreign word meaning "a very hot sauce made with red chili peppers", and gives its ultimate origin as the word for "pepper" (presumably in the native-African sense) in the Ronga language of southern Mozambique, where Portuguese explorers developed the homonymous ..."

From our search we found, the sauce has been around since the 15th century when Portuguese explorers came across the African bird's eye chili pepper. They made a marinade that included garlic, red wine vinegar, paprika, and other seasonings. After five hundred years there is still a debate of the exact origins of the recipe. This is what makes food so interesting.

Peppers and Peri Peri Sauce

This sauce really brings the flavor to the party!!! As I mentioned, the original Peri Peri Sauce is made with "Birds eye" chili peppers and was found by Portuguese explorers in Mozambique. There is a long history of this sauce.

We found any pepper can be used. So, if you want to make a non-spicy version just substitute with a sweet pepper. Of course, we love it spicy and, as we found, is a major keeper!!!!

If you're not familiar with the bird's eye chili, according to Wikipedia, it's "small, but is quite hot (piquant). It measures around 50,000 - 100,000 Scoville units, which is at the lower half of the range for the hotter habanero, but still much hotter than a jalapeño."

For our Peri Peri sauce, we used a mix of peppers. We used the Purple UFO and Moroccan Cayenne Pepper which are both 30,000 to 50,00 Scoville heat units. And, to ensure it had plenty of heat, we added a ghost pepper which goes up to 1,000,000 on the heat scale!!!! So the sauce had a nice "kick-in-the-whiskers"!!!! 😆

What's in the Peri Peri Sauce or Piri Piri

This Chili-licious recipe includes a lot of our favorites like garlic, lemons, vinegar, fresh herbs, paprika, and, of course, lots of peppers. This sauce is very popular around the world so we just had to try it. And we are so happy we did. It's now one of our favorite sauces. My all-time favorite sauce has always been Pesto .....but now it's this sauce 😋

So whether you call it peri-peri or piri-piri the popularity of this chili sauce around the world and over the centuries proves it’s a keeper. 

Some of our other favorite sauce recipes are: