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 everything from homemade Thai Sriracha and sweet chilli sauce to tonkatsu sauce and tartare sauce.
Making these homemade condiments has been a very satisfying diversion during the pandemic and recent lockdowns we’ve been experiencing. Whenever we’ve had to stock the cupboard and fridge, we’ve taken stock of what we’ve been stockpiling.
Do we really need that giant old jar of tartare sauce at the back of the fridge that seems to last forever when we can just make fresh tartare sauce as needed. Should we replace that bottle of sweet chilli sauce that is more sweet than chilli when we can make our own small batches of chilli sauce?
What our pandemic cooking experiments have confirmed is that homemade condiments not only taste better than the supermarket brands but they are more affordable and healthier, as we know exactly what we’re putting in them and it’s all good.
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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.
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.
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.
Tartare Sauce Recipe
For us, homemade beer battered fish and handcut chips without tartare sauce is like a hot dog without mustard and tomato sauce or ketchup to our American readers. 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 make fish and hand cut crispy potato chips at home, tartare sauce in a jar does not cut the mustard, so to speak. Commercial tartare sauce is too sweet and has too many preservatives. Our’s has neither, which makes this tartare sauce recipe another of our best homemade condiments recipes.
Sichuan Red Chilli Oil Recipe
This Sichuan red chilli oil recipe makes another of our top homemade condiments recipes. This essential ingredient of Sichuanese cooking and a specialty from China’s Sichuan province, chilli oil is an amazing thing. 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 style wontons, dan dan noodles and kung pao chicken.
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. I’ve recipe-tested several different versions of tonkatsu sauce at home during the pandemic, yet one night when I was short on time and went to buy some tonkatsu sauce from the supermarket, I 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, another of our favourite homemade condiments recipes, and have it on tonkatsu burgers or tonkatsu fried rice and you may never buy a supermarket 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.
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