These homemade condiments are so delicious, affordable and healthy that once you make them at home you may never want to buy a bottled or jarred commercial sauce brand from a supermarket or grocer again. They include recipes from homemade Thai Sriracha and sweet chilli sauce, tonkatsu sauce, and tartare sauce, and more.
Do you really need that big old jar of tartare sauce at the back of the fridge that seems to last forever when you can just make fresh tartare sauce as needed? Should you replace that bottle of Thai sweet chilli sauce that is more sickly sweet than spicy when you can make your own small batches of chilli sauce? We think so. We regularly make our own condiments and they are so delicious and the process is very satisfying.
Homemade condiments not only taste better than the supermarket brands but they are more affordable and healthier, as you know exactly what you’re putting in them and it’s all good. We’ve long made our own condiments when we’ve had time, but we first began seriously making homemade condiments during the pandemic when they turned out to be a very satisfying diversion, and we haven’t stopped.
We’ve got recipes for Thai Sriracha sauce and Thai sweet chilli sauce (so much more balanced than supermarket brands); two Sichuan red chilli oils to douse on Sichuan style wontons, jazz up instant ramen and drizzle on congee, rice soups, and rice porridges; a homemade tartare sauce without the preservatives and gluggy texture of commercial sauces; homemade tonkatsu sauce for the crunchy Japanese pork cutlets, tonkatsu burgers and tonkatsu fried rice; and a Mexican salsa macha, often compared to Mexico’s Lao Gan Ma (one of our all-time favourite condiments), but is more like a combo of chilli crisp and chilli oil. We use it on this spiced shredded chicken and corn salad.
Now before I tell you about these homemade condiments recipes we have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader supported. If you’ve cooked and enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by supporting our Cambodian cuisine history and cookbook on Patreon; buying a handcrafted KROK, the best mortar and pestle ever; booking a cooking class or meal with locals on EatWith; or buying something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers or classic cookbooks for serious cooks. Now let me tell you about these homemade condiments recipes.
Homemade Condiments You’ll Never Buy from a Store Again After Making These at Home
These homemade condiments recipes include sauces that we regularly used to buy from the supermarket that we now make at home. There are many more condiments that we’re recipe-testing that we’ll add to this compilation as we publish them.
Before starting to make your own homemade condiments, stock up on vintage mason jars and clip-top Kilner jars. If you’re recycling used jars, make sure to thoroughly sterilise them first in a pot of boiling water on the stove. We love to make homemade condiments to gift during the festive season.
Sweet Chilli Sauce Recipe
One of our favourite homemade condiments recipes is this Thai sweet chilli sauce recipe, because it has one thing that most store-bought sweet chilli sauces don’t have – a balance of flavours. Most commercial sweet chilli sauces are sickly sweet and stingy on the actual chillies.
The best part of making your own sweet chilli sauce is not just the lack of preservatives in it, it’s the fact you can tailor the sauce to suit your heat preferences – and you can cut down on the sugar and artificial thickeners.
Homemade Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce Recipe for the Best Sweet Chilli Sauce You’ll Taste
Thai Sriracha Sauce Recipe
To be honest, the world-famous American ‘rooster’ branded hot sauce tastes like no chilli sauce that comes out of Southeast Asia. While you may ask, “why should it, when it’s an American product?” Well, it’s named after the coastal city of Sri Racha, Thailand, which happens to have its own style of chilli sauce called Sriracha sauce, so there’s that.
Making your own Thai Sriracha is easy and it will result in a chilli sauce that doesn’t have that bitter heat and overpowering vinegar aftertaste. This Thai Sriracha sauce recipe is easily another of our favourite homemade condiments recipes.
This Sriracha Sauce Recipe Makes the Best Homemade Thai Sriracha Sauce You’ll Taste
Tartare Sauce Recipe
For us, homemade fish and chips without homemade tartare sauce is like a hot dog without mustard and tomato sauce or ketchup. While we’re okay with those tiny tubs of tartare sauce you get with takeaway fish and chips to tuck into by the beach, when we’re going to make the effort to cook beer battered fish and chips with handcut potato chips at home, tartare sauce in a jar does not cut the mustard, so to speak.
Aside from the gluggy texture of most supermarket tartare sauce brands, commercial tartare sauce is generally too sweet for us and has way too many preservatives. Our homemade tartare sauce recipe has neither, which makes this tartare sauce recipe another of our best homemade condiments recipes.
Easy Homemade Tartare Sauce Recipe for the Condiment of Culinary Legend
Sichuan Red Chilli Oil Recipes
These Sichuan red chilli oil recipes make another of our best homemade condiments recipes. An essential ingredient of Sichuanese cooking and a specialty from China’s Sichuan province, chilli oil is an amazing thing. You can douse it on your Sichuan style wontons, dan dan noodles and kung pao chicken. We also spoon it onto instant ramen noodles, congee, rice soups, and rice porridges, and anything with fried eggs and jammy boiled eggs.
However, it’s hard to find the real thing in many countries, even in an Asian supermarket, or a supermarket here in Asia. Easier to find are some of the popular Thai brands of chilli oil, but most taste like rancid-red flavoured cooking oil. If you can find the right chillies and the usual Asian spices, you can make a far superior chilli oil for dousing on your Sichuan specialties.
Sichuan Red Chilli Oil Recipe – How to Make Two Red Chilli Oils From One Recipe
Mexican Salsa Macha Recipe
This easy Mexican salsa macha recipe makes a spicy chilli salsa with a crispy texture courtesy of ground dried chillies, peanuts and sesame seeds. Often described as a Mexican chilli crisp – the massively popular, textured Chinese chilli-based condiment, the most famous of which is Lao Gan Ma (one of our all-time favourite condiments) – salsa macha is more like a Mexican version of the Sichuan chilli oils, above.
It’s called a ‘salsa’ in Mexico, where it has its origins in the state of Veracruz, and it can be used on everything from tortillas to salads. Salsa macha is an essential component in our shredded chicken and corn salad recipe, which is loaded with flavour.
Traditionally, salsa macha is made by pounding the ingredients in a Mexican molcajete, just as we make our condiments and pastes in a granite mortar and pestle here in Southeast Asia.
Mexican Salsa Macha Recipe for the Mexican Chilli Crisp from Veracruz
Japanese Tonkatsu Sauce Recipe
This tonkatsu sauce is tailor-made for the simple but revered deep-fried Japanese pork cutlet that simply melts-in-your-mouth when made correctly. The tangy taste of the tonkatsu sauce that accompanies it is not an option, it’s essential – and it should be house-made.
Terence recipe-tested several different versions of tonkatsu sauce. Yet one night, when short on time, we went to buy tonkatsu sauce from the supermarket, and could not believe the price nor the list of ingredients on the jar that are needed to preserve this sauce.
Make a batch of this homemade tonkatsu sauce recipe, another of our favourite homemade condiments recipes, and have it on the crunchy Japanese pork cutlet it’s made for, plus pour it onto tonkatsu burgers or tonkatsu fried rice, and you may never buy a supermarket tonkatsu sauce brand again.
Please do let us know if you make any of these homemade condiments recipes as we’d love to know how they turn out for you. And, of course, if you don’t want to make your own condiments, these are our all time favourite condiments brands when we buy them.
