A sk any ten people from across the world what they correlate with Indian food, and at least nine of them will reply with a single word: ‘Chillies’. It will not be far off the mark either, even though it was, in historical terms, only last week that the marriage between Indian food and chillies was solemnised.
This hottest of spices has been around since 7500 BCE, pre-dating the Indus Civilization by five millennia. The earliest accounts that we have of chillies being used in cuisine are from around 5000 BCE in Mexico: Astonishing when you consider that chilli reached Indian shores a mere 450 years ago, that too, when the Portuguese brought it with them to Goa, in what must rank as a supreme twist of irony. It seems scarcely believable that it was the Europeans who introduced Indians to an ingredient that has since been subsumed into Indian cookery so thoroughly that today India is the world’s largest producer, consumer and exporter of chillies, of which 75 per cent come from Andhra Pradesh alone.
Considering what an integral spice chillies are to Indian cuisine, it is mystifying how the records that exist are maddeningly imprecise; all we know for sure is that the Portuguese brought chillies to Goa, presumably from Brazil. In her fascinating book, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors , Lizzie Collingham notes that within 30 years of Vasco da Gama arriving at Goa (in 1498 BCE), three varieties of chillies had started being grown around Goa. They were known as Pernambucco peppers, suggesting that their place of origin was Brazil, a Portuguese colony at the time. Their use grew rapidly southwards, supplanting the far more expensive black pepper and pipli (long pepper). According to Collingham, the use of chillies spread to Delhi and Agra only with the Marathas towards the end of the Mughal period. It is scarcely believable that even 250 years after the Portuguese introduced chillies to India, North India was still without this spice.
So integral is chilli to our cuisine that the most damning indictment of a meal in India is the sentence: Namak mirchi kam hai (There’s not much salt or chillies in this dish). It puts the cook down completely. It also tells us about the elemental place of chillies in the Indian diet. Nobody quibbles over the amount of turmeric or cumin in a dish. But add too few chillies and the dish is bland and boring.
But where did the chilli originate? Scientists believe that Bolivia is the cradle of chillies and have postulated an interesting theory about its flavour versus its hotness. Every plant in the wild needs the propagation of its seeds to multiply. In the case of chillies, it’s mostly done by birds. On the other hand, destructive insects also perceive the chilli as delicious and bore through its flesh, but do not play a part in seed dispersal. So nature seems to have devised a way for chilli plants to be hot enough for birds to find attractive, but too hot for insects to handle. Scientists discovered this when they looked at chilli plants growing wild all over Bolivia: Those that existed in relatively cold, temperate areas did not have to be protected from insects and were mild while those in hot, humid areas needed all the protection they could get from insects, and so were hot.
Today, the world has moved a long way from wild chilli plants. It is believed that Mexico was the first country where chilli plants were cultivated. It certainly makes sense. Though every country of South America grows chillies, none have the spectacular range of Mexican chillies, where it is believed to have been introduced over 6,000 years ago by Native American communities called the Pueblo. And indeed, the use of chillies in mole sauces in Mexican cuisine is more nuanced than anywhere else in the world.
Now grown in many places in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, as well as Europe and Australia, chillies are carefully hybridized for colour, hotness and thinness (or thickness) of skin. Out of the approximately 200 varieties of chillies grown in India, 36 grow in Andhra Pradesh, India’s largest chilli-growing belt. Ever heard of wonder hot, teja or byadagi? No? You might still have tasted any, or all, of them at some point in your life because these are just some of the varieties of chillies that grow in Andhra Pradesh.
Although chillies are grown in many parts of Andhra, the catchment area is certainly Guntur, with its rich black cotton soil that is conducive to chilli farming. So it makes sense that I start my journey into the world of chillies here.
In Guntur, the government-controlled market yard for chillies (that, by its very nature, does not take into account chillies from other regions in Andhra Pradesh, much less those from Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, India’s other chilli-growing regions) has an area of 50 acres that allows 2,000 farmers to sell upto 60,000 quintals of fiery red chillies a day to customers that range from aggregators to branded spice merchants. You’ll often see huge trucks around the area, with goods securely wrapped in layers of tarpaulin, plying miles and miles from India’s chilli capital to destinations across the country. You’ll know what they’re carrying as soon as you get the familiar pungent whiff, right in the middle of a highway. I remember on my drive back from Guntur, through Vijaywada to Hyderabad, the air-conditioning of the taxi I had hired had coughed weakly and faded away. There had been no other option but to roll down the windows. After a while on the road, I developed a sort of sixth sense about the giant trucks that overtook us ever so often. They were laden to the gills with chillies, which had presumably been packed into sacks and then covered with at least one layer of water-proofing and then tied firmly down with ropes. But even through all the layers, they still exuded a pungency that burnt my eyes and seared my throat, making me hurriedly roll up the windows.
Around the area, you’ll also see fields of chilli plants, vast courtyards where different types of chillies are being sorted expertly by women, who appear to suffer no ill-effects after sifting through chillies for upto eight hours a day, and four-storeyed cold storage facilities that have a holding capacity of up to 50 lakh sacks, each containing 50 kilos. Freshly harvested chillies typically have a moisture capacity of 80 per cent, which makes them highly susceptible to spoilage. Keeping them in cold storage till the farmer gets the right price is a practice that works well for everybody concerned: The farmer gets his price, the cold storage owner gets his rent and the customer gets chillies that have taken anywhere between two to eight days to dry out, depending on the temperatures at that time. Guntur has, in its immediate vicinity, no fewer than 600 cold storage facilities.
You don’t have to have endless acres of land to stand up and be counted as a chilli farmer in Guntur. In fact, all you need is 10–12 acres and the biggies in Guntur have around 20 acres. Unlike many other spice crops, farmers here don’t have to hedge their bets by planting more than one crop. It is just chillies that do it for them because demand always outstrips supply in this famous chilli growing belt. The more pressing problem for them is the variety of chilli to plant. The endemic variety, Guntur Sannam, is beautiful to look at, but agriculturalists deride it since it’s very susceptible to pests. LCA 334 is one of the latest varieties, having been developed by Guntur’s agricultural scientists. (All chillies – indeed all agricultural products – are often hybridized, and as nobody has the time to think up evocative names, the way they do for race horses, crops are saddled with singularly impersonal names.) LCA 334 has the great advantage of not needing much fertilizer and being far more pest-resistant than older varieties.
Of course, it helps to have pest-resistant chillies, but the other variable that affects the crop profoundly is the weather. If it rains in the final couple of months of their cultivation cycle, the crop is ruined, causing half of the produce to turn white. The nimble-fingered women of Guntur usually remove impurities from bags of chillies in no time at all, their fingers long past the sensitivity that affects us lesser mortals, but spoilt crops confound even these experts. These white chillies (as they are known in the trade) are usually kept aside and sold to some unscrupulous trader who probably mixes one bag of white with several of red, since the price of white chillies is one-fifth that of the highest grade of the popular red chillies. No large brand name will buy white chillies (or so one hopes), since there’s only one way to make them look red, and that is by adding artificial colour. Rajesh Kumar, a Hyderabad-based agricultural technologist who has taught me a lot about this particular spice, tells me of a simple test you can perform in your kitchen to tell whether there are artificial chemicals in your chilli powder: Just add ether to a measure of chilli powder, pour the surface layer into another container and add a few drops of hydrochloric acid. If the colour turns pink, it means that the chillies have been tampered with.
Why does Andhra Pradesh in general, and Guntur in particular, do so well by growing chillies? In part, it is because of mother nature, who has endowed the centre of the state with swathes of the rich, black soil that retains the moisture that chilli plants need. In part, it is because of the patient nature of the Andhra farmers, who painstakingly pluck chillies several times a year. You cannot harvest chillies once a year and relax for the rest: they are more demanding than that. They are sown in May, transplanted in July, and the first crop comes within a month, and it is always green. The first couple of crops of green chillies have to be plucked while they are green as the first two pluckings of a new plant are always scant. It is after the third plucking, that is after November, when the fruit – as it is known in the agricultural trade – begins to form in abundance and when it turns red after being left on the plant.
Some farmers elect to grow only green chillies – the kind that all of us get free of cost at the neighbourhood vegetable vendor. This sort of farmer has to have a lot of patience, because his fruit has to be picked three times a week or else it will turn red. Rajesh Kumar tells me that this kind of farmer has to start differently as well because green chillies usually come in a different set of species from red ones. Let me rephrase: All green chillies eventually grow red however, it would be rather eccentric for a farmer to grow the tomato chilli, a variety that gives a beautiful red colour, but hardly any pungency, and then decide to pluck it three times a week so that his entire crop is picked green. Instead, he would choose varieties that are best eaten green.
The species of chilli decides the kind of cuisine it will eventually be used in. There are chillies with thin skins and those with thick ones. When chilli powder is the ultimate objective, thin-skinned chillies are essential. In general, the skin of the Andhra Pradesh chilli is thin so that disintegration in a cooked dish, podi or chutney is instantaneous. On the other hand, when you are making a coarse powder, such as the kind that fast food outlets serve in pouches and place in jars on the tables, thick-skinned chillies work best. They also work better for tempering, especially in food down south, where a huge range of dishes is tempered with broken red chillies, mustard seeds and maybe a teaspoonful of urad dal (pulses) and/or curry leaves.
Some particularly interesting and photogenic chillies include the fat, round chillies of Tamil Nadu called gundu, the byadagi (or bedgi) chillies that are long and crinkly and the lesser-known kundapuri chillies, both from Karnataka, Goa’s famous aldona chilli, the tiny bird’s eye chilli of Assam and Nagaland, the glossy scarlet dallae khursani of Sikkim, which looks like innocuous cherries, to name only a few.
There are also chillies that don’t turn red at all. Andhra Pradesh has one such. It is called Gollapadu, after the village near Rajahmundry around which it grows in such tiny quantities that exporting, or even trading, it is out of the question. Expert Andhra Pradesh pickle-makers, usually those from women’s cooperatives, hunt down the Gollapadu for those pickles where a red colour is not desirable.
The other is the yellow chilli that grows in very small quantities in pockets of the country. Manali is one place where they actually have a slight flavour, besides being just plain hot. Traditionally, in Ladakh, the only chilli eaten was the Manali chilli after it is gently fried and then coarsely pounded. It is put on the table of every household in Ladakh and added, according to personal preference, by each family member. Thukpas, momos and even Ladakhi sausages made of lamb are all spiced with Manali chilli.
In its powdered form, yellow chilli is also used in surprisingly large quantities by the Muslim community of North India. In Old Delhi, the no-nonsense stalls of fried chicken and fried fish that line the roads all over Urdu Bazar opposite the Jama Masjid, all use yellow chilli rather than the common red chilli powder in conjuction with curd (dahi) and gram flour (besan) to marinate meats and fish. As a result, it’s quite easy to score a packet of yellow chilli in this part of town as compared to other parts of the city, where you’re often met with a blank stare.
But one can hardly blame the local shopkeeper as it is often hard to tell one type of chilli apart from another, so much so that even seasoned spice merchants can be fooled. One example of this is the elusive ‘Kashmiri chilli’. Chillies of this variety are fragrant and mild, and when you eat them uncooked in summer, you just know that they are slated to metamorphose into a most superior product: full of flavour without being too spicy. They are also coveted because of their ‘bleeding’ nature as their signature fiery colour ‘seeps’ into the dish. But what is often masqueraded as ‘true’ Kashmiri chilli at your local grocer’s is rarely, if ever, the original Kashmiri strain. The local crop of Kashmiri chillies, grown in Pampore and Noor Bagh, is too tiny to go around the state, let alone the whole country. It is the chillies from Himachal, often grown in the valley and hybridized with the original strain, that are found in grocery stores. Most often, this hybridization is performed by agriculturists. Sometimes, however, accidental hybridization has also taken place because the two varieties are grown in proximity to each other, and the features of one have begun to show up in the features of another. That is the reason why the original strain called Kashmiri chillies has now been altered, perhaps irrevocably.
When Chef Alejandro Estrada Vela came from Mexico City to The Lalit hotel for a Mexican food festival, he told me a story that had me in splits. Apparently, he took a walk around some of the city’s markets to familiarize himself with local ingredients. At INA Market, where the who’s-who of Delhi does its shopping, maids and chauffeurs in tow, Vela chanced upon a spice shop selling whole red chillies, and asked to taste the hottest one. The shopkeepers sat up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. If they could reduce a foreigner to a snivelling wreck, it would brighten up their day! They gave him a Reshampatti, popular in Gujarat and Maharashtra for pickle making. ‘Not hot,’ grumbled Vela. They gave him a Guntur Sannam, the variety native to Guntur. No response. With increasingly falling faces, they kept feeding him every chilli they had in stock, but Vela just kept munching them down like they were carrots. Finally, in disgust, Vela took out a couple of habaneros from his pocket. ‘Do you have anything like this?’ he asked. The shopkeepers reached out eagerly, not knowing that they were about to partake of the world’s second spiciest chilli. Vela’s face was impassive as they bit into the Mexican bombshells and their heads almost exploded. I pity the shopkeepers in this story, because the Mexican habanero measures between 100,000 to 350,000 units on the Scoville scale, which is used to measure the hotness of the alkaloid enzyme that gives chillies their pungency. It starts from 0 in the case of capsicum which is, botanically, a chilli pepper, and can go over 10 lakh Scoville Heat Units (SHU) for hybrids developed as ‘the world’s hottest chilli’, like Infinity chilli and the Naga Viper pepper.
There is a continuum on the chilli scale. And everyone’s tolerance to the enzyme is different. One man’s outer tolerance level barely registers as spicy at all on the next person. And even though as Indians we pride ourselves on our spice-tolerance levels, most of us are not accustomed to eating very spicy chillies, except for maybe people in North-East India, who habitually ingest one of the world’s hottest chillies: The bhut jolokia, or the ghost chilli. The first time I tasted it, albeit in a watered-down version, what struck me most was the manner in which the spice hit me. It was rather like getting an electric shock, even though the owner of the Naga restaurant where I tasted it assured me that for the sake of customers who were unused to the real thing, she had diluted the proportions greatly. You are, apparently, not even supposed to eat the chilli itself, but soak it in oil for a few days, and then use the oil. Even that has to be used judiciously. The Naga restaurant-owner told me that their version of the dish uses three chillies in oil to spice five kilos of meat for Delhites. Customers hailing from Nagaland would be served far spicier food than that!
Sikkim’s dallae khursani is a close second when it comes to packing a mean punch. Almost indistinguishable from cherries, they are as small and as round, though not, let it be said, as sweet. Perhaps because of their thick skin, these beauties cannot be dried, so they have to be eaten fresh. They are fantastically spicy and available branded in shops in tourist areas or unbranded at local vegetable wholesale markets where they are sold in huge plastic vats and ladled out in multiples of 100 grams. The Sikkimese eat them with every meal, either fresh or after cooking them into a deadly chutney.
However, compared to two of China’s regional cuisines – Sichuan and Hunan – the predominant chunk of Indian cuisine isn’t even particularly spicy. Try eating the Sichuan speciality Chongqing chicken, in which tiny pieces of chicken are fried in chilli-flavoured oil and dunked into a bed of angry red chillies. A person from the province of Sichuan knows that all 250 grams of the chopped chillies used in the dish have to be eaten; I have never even tried to do more than peck at the chicken nuggets. In fact, what we are served in Chinese restaurants in India in bowls placed at the table is not the chilli paste used in China, but a version that is much milder, and contains no dried seafood in deference to Indian vegetarian sensibilities. All across the Chinese speaking world, however, you will be served, at your table, an eye-wateringly spicy pounded chilli paste with dried shrimp for a double whammy of savoury and spicy.
But because we, somewhat mistakenly, constantly associate spicy chillies with Indian food, I am often surprised when I encounter the fiery red devils in other countries. Europe is not the prime example of spicy food, so it is surprising to find that the southern toe of Italy, Calabria, is famous throughout the country for its chillies. If, at an Italian delicatessen, you spot a couple of types of speckled red salume , you will know that it is Calabrian without having to ask. Many varieties of chillies grow in Calabria with the smallest looking like bird’s eye chillies. Packed in brine, they make great gifts for friends who enjoy spicy food. The best part is that just one or two of these tiny chillies are hot enough for a lover of pungent food.
The Mercado Central of Valencia, in Southern Spain, a spectacular indoor market built entirely of iron girders and covered with glass, has a section for meats, hams, Agua de Valencia, seafood, vegetables and chillies! But such is the mildness of these chillies that you won’t cough or sneeze even if you are standing right next to where the chillies are hung in display.
On the other hand, walk down the local market behind the Shangri La Hotel in Bangkok and you will find a modest, pedestrian-only lane selling ingredients and spice pastes for curries. Because the chillies, as well as the rest of the spices, have been freshly ground, you will sneeze away till you cover your nose with a damp kerchief. As it is all made for locals, there are no wrappers and the balls of chillies, cilantro, turmeric and cumin are like powerful bombs, ready to explode on someone’s palate, unless tamped down with enough coconut milk. Every Thai restaurant has phrik nam pla, sliced fresh chillies in fish sauce, on the table, the way Indian restaurants have green chutney and vinegared onions. Only take a bite if you know what you are doing because they pack a mean punch.
I never expected to see chillies in Pike Place, Seattle, that too, in colours ranging from yellow to purple. But there they were, in decorative wreaths, waiting to be bought by anyone who welcomes a touch of pungence in their food. With low temperatures and low humidity levels, fresh chillies can stay fresh for a couple of weeks, brightening up a corner of a kitchen, with one or two going into the cooking pot.
Another difference I’ve noticed in my travels is how chillies are used in India – as also China and South-East Asia – and in other parts of the world. Here, we mostly use it to spice our food; flavour is not the primary motivation. If you don’t have Karnataka’s kundapuri chillies, you would happily use Kashmir’s pampori ones. In fact, no recipe book that I have ever come across has ever made the distinction between one type of chilli and the other which, in my opinion, is a shame. Chilli growers, suppliers and vendors, too, categorize chillies solely on the basis of their hotness quotient. But in a place like Mexico, however, things are very different. They have over 200 varieties of chillies, each of which has a specific flavour and a well-defined place in each dish. Some are smoked, some are sun-dried, some are sweet and mild, while some are deadly spicy. You cannot substitute anchos for poblanos in Mexican cuisine, and expect to get away with it! And yet, we do just that in most Indian cuisines. Not only are all Indian chillies different, with various distinct attributes, different countries and regions pick them for uses based on their specifications. Rajesh Kumar, whom I’ve mentioned before, runs his own business as an aggregator of the spice. That means that when major importers of chillies (and other agricultural products) come looking for, say, two lakh tonnes of a particular product, Rajesh Kumar gets varying amounts from a clutch of different sources and ships it off. He usually exports chillies to US, UK, Canada, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. He says that the most fascinating aspect of his business is to figure out what the buyers want from the same spice, and why. For example, in India, all Surya-, Swastik- and Priya-brand pickles require chillies that will retain their red colour for a long time. If consumers feel their pickle is turning brown rapidly, they will move on to another brand, even though it has been proved that colour does not have any correlation to taste. In addition, South India requires its chilli powder to be less red than North India, even within the same brand. One of the ways to do this is to blend the same three varieties of chillies all over the country, but in different proportions, so that the one with the most colour-giving properties dominates in the north, but recedes in the south. The other way to do it is to put more seeds in the south and less in the north.
Other buyers want specific attributes not just a specific colour. UK requires that its chillies be plaited in long braids so as to be used along with braids of onions and garlic that hang in the kitchen. They are plucked from the braid, one at a time, as and when required. That’s probably why they go for Guntur chillies since they have around 11 per cent moisture and therefore, can easily be plaited together. Rajasthani chillies, on the other hand, are too brittle for that, since they have only 3 per cent moisture. The Arab countries, that Kumar exports to, require stalks to be left on the chillies. They are very specific about this, and they are the only market to have this specification. Chefs in Arab countries de-stalk chillies and crush them between their palms at the time of using them, usually on spit-grilled meat which has been basted with olive oil. Because of the stalk, all the seeds are still inside the chilli and, when the meat is roasted, they catch the flame and turn it blue. If the meat is being grilled outdoors at night, or in front of diners, the whole effect is quite dramatic. Without the seeds, half the drama is lost. Hence, the importance of the stalk.
Here in India, you can count on the fingers of one hand the savoury dishes in each community that do not use this spice. You’ll find them easily enough with some one or the other pointing out, ‘Don’t bother with this one. It has no chillies. The gravy is white.’ The idea being that white, of course, is the most unattractive colour when it comes to Indian food. But this too is hardly a universal fact. Kerala’s meen moilee is pale yellow, as are Goa’s fish caldine, Bengal’s doi maach, the Bohra dabba gosht and Kashmir’s mutton yakhni.
Like turmeric and saffron, chillies, too, are often credited with a value that transcends the mere culinary and I’m not talking about the occasional newspaper reports that tells us how certain prisoners escaped from jail by throwing chilli powder into the eyes of their captors. Red chillies, in Indian culture, reportedly remove the effects of the ‘evil eye’. Astrologer Paresh Arya, whom I spoke to about this, says that since red is the colour of the planet Mars, and the day of the week associated with Mars is Tuesday, that is the most propitious day for removing the evil eye with chillies by burning them. The only criterion is that they should have their stalks intact, for some mysterious reason that nobody can explain.
In some parts of the country, green chillies do a similar job. Seven green chillies suspended horizontally from a string with a lime at the base – an image that is so iconic in the country that it has acquired a cultural status that transcends state borders – is called nazar kawatch. All over India, wholesale vegetable markets will have a corner devoted to ladies busily making these miniature totems to sell to owners of small shops.
Is it because chillies burn that the connection with evil eye has been formed? After all, burning is associated with fire, which in turn, is a symbol of purity, of cleansing out the evil. It’s hard to be certain, but it’s a likely explanation. Try burning chillies in a clay brazier and the smoke will singe your eyes and throat. In fact, when the market yard at Guntur suffered from a devastating fire in 2008, the firemen complained that they could not get close enough because the fumes, caused by so many burning chillies, were suffocating and made them nearly blind. It is the reason why chillies are often the last spice to be added to a dish. Typically, you would sauté onions, ginger and garlic, followed by powdered coriander seeds, zeera and haldi and finally add powdered red chillies, but only after the pan has been taken off the heat. Try sautéing chillies on a high flame and you’ll be left with a burnt mass that will sting your eyes and be inedible in the bargain.
For a spice that had its inception in South America, and was introduced to Asia by Europeans, the chilli has had a long, glorious and rather unexpected history. But even more wondrous is how we Indians have, in less than 450 years, embraced this spice so completely that it is now indistinguishable from Indian cuisine.
NADIYAH AKRAM’S POL-SAMBOL
(COCONUT RELISH)
For Nadiyah Akram, my friend from Sri Lanka, cooking is a lightning fast activity, with whatever ingredients are at hand, in the midst of her busy lifestyle.
INGREDIENTS
• 1 cup fresh coconut, scraped
• 3 tsp chilli powder (or to taste)
• 1 tsp chilli flakes (or to taste)
• 1 tsp canned tuna fish flakes
• 2–3 tbsp lime juice (or to taste)
• ½ cup shallots, finely chopped
• 1 green chilli, finely chopped
• Salt, to taste
METHOD
• Grind the scraped coconut, chilli flakes and powder, tuna fish and lime juice together in a mortar and pestle until the coconut has become completely red.
• Add other ingredients and mix well.
Note: This is best eaten with roti, bread or string hoppers. Also great in a sandwich! You can add chopped tomatoes to the mix if desired.
For a building contractor who only picked up cooking when he went to the UK to attend university, Atul Sikand was born to be in the kitchen. He runs a highly successful recipe group on Facebook called Sikandalous Cuisine , where members share recipes. Sikand only needs to glance at them to tell whether they will work or need tweaking.
Jungli maas was originally a meat prepared by the Rajput community when they were travelling or out on hunting trips. As there was little access to ingredients during travel, the meat was cooked using non-perishable ingredients such as ghee, salt and red chillies.
INGREDIENTS
• 500 g mutton, cubed
• 4 tbsp ghee
• 15–20 red chillies, preferably from Mathania
• ½ cup water
• Rock salt or pahari namak, to taste
METHOD
• Heat the ghee, add the meat and sauté well for 10–15 minutes.
• When the meat has browned well, add salt and dried red chillies.
• Cover and let it simmer. Half-way through, say about 25 minutes later, add the water in stages and gently let the meat simmer till succulent and tender – the idea is to keep the balance between the ghee and the water. There shouldn’t be too much water at any time, nor should the meat fry.
Note: Don’t let the quantity of chillies intimidate you: This dish remains medium hot and is absolutely melt-in-the-mouth delicious.
KAVERI PONNAPA’S PRAWN PERI-PERI
Food blogger Kaveri Ponnapa's recipe uses three kinds of chillies. It is from the Mozambique coast and is a throwback to the Portuguese voyages of world discovery.
STEP I: Peri-peri Butter
INGREDIENTS
• 500 g unsalted butter, softened.
• 4–5 dried bird’s eye chillies (or more according to taste)
• 6 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp paprika
• Red chilli powder, to taste
• Juice of 3–4 limes (or to taste)
• Sea salt, to taste
METHOD
• Pound the chillies and garlic together in a mortar and pestle.
• Mix with the softened butter, along with paprika, red chilli powder, salt and lime juice.
• Chill, until required.
STEP II: The Prawns
INGREDIENTS
• 1 kg jumbo prawns, cleaned, with shells and heads left on
• Lime juice, to taste
• Peri-peri butter
• Fresh coriander leaves, chopped
• Lime wedges, to serve
METHOD
• Using a sharp knife, slice through the backs of the prawn shells keeping the shells intact and, remove the vein.
• Wash in lightly salted water, drain and pat dry.
• Place the prawns in a glass or stainless steel bowl, drizzle with lime juice, and cover with the peri-peri butter. Marinate for about 5–10 minutes.
• Preheat the grill to 200°C.
• Place the prawns on a baking tray under the hot grill for 5–7 minutes, basting with the melted butter, turning once if necessary, taking care not to overcook. They should be very tender with plenty of liquid, spiced butter.
• Sprinkle with chopped coriander leaves and serve.
Note: Saffron rice can be served with this dish.