This recipe is from David Leite, a James Beard Award-winning Portuguese-American food writer and the author of The New Portuguese Table, published on his site as “Portuguese Piri-Piri Hot Sauce” at Leite’s Culinaria. It’s a simple, uncooked chile sauce that Leite says shows up on tables “found everywhere in Portugal and in former colonies, particularly Angola and Mozambique.”
Piri-piri (also spelled peri-peri) refers both to a specific small, fiery chile pepper and to the sauce made from it, and Leite is careful about the history: chile peppers are a New World plant, and he credits Columbus with bringing them back to Europe from the Americas in 1493. From there, Portuguese traders and navigators carried the pepper along their global routes during the Age of Discovery, which is how a fruit native to the Americas became rooted in Portuguese cooking and, from Portugal, in the cuisines of Angola and Mozambique.
Ingredients
- 4 to 8 fresh hot chiles, depending on how much heat you want
- 2 garlic cloves, minced
- Juice of 1 lemon
- Pinch of salt
- 1/2 to 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil, depending on how thin you want the sauce
Method
- Coarsely chop the chiles and discard the stems, keeping the seeds.
- Put the chiles and their seeds, the garlic, lemon juice, salt, and as much of the olive oil as you want in a food processor fitted with a metal blade, and purée.
- Pour the mixture into a small glass jar and let it steep in the fridge for at least a day.
- Leite prefers to leave it with a little texture, but the mixture can be strained back into the jar if you want a smoother sauce.
The finished sauce keeps in the refrigerator for up to four days, and Leite is explicit that it isn’t meant to be kept around longer than that: raw garlic held in oil carries a botulism risk if it sits too long, so he recommends using the sauce within that window and discarding what’s left rather than stretching it further.
Leite notes this particular version is adapted from The New Cooks’ Catalogue, and it’s gone through his site’s recipe-testing process, which he says only about 68 percent of tested recipes survive. He credits three James Beard Awards to his writing and to Leite’s Culinaria overall, and he’s also the author of The New Portuguese Table and Notes on a Banana, alongside more than 27 years developing and testing recipes for the site.
Sourcing the Right Chile
Genuine fresh piri-piri chiles are difficult to find in the United States unless you grow them yourself. Leite suggests substitutes depending on availability and how much heat you want, including Thai bird chiles, red jalapeño, santaka, chile de árbol, cayenne, or Tabasco peppers. Dried piri-piri chiles are more findable than fresh ones, though he notes they’re considerably more concentrated, so the quantity needs adjusting if you swap them in.
How It’s Used
Leite describes piri-piri as a genuinely multipurpose condiment in Portuguese and Lusophone-African cooking rather than a one-dish sauce. His own list of where it belongs spans both a marinade and a finished condiment: poultry, smoked spare ribs, grilled lobster, grilled scallops, and grilled chicken specifically, plus sandwiches and pizza — dishes that only make sense if the sauce is drizzled on after cooking rather than used purely as a pre-grill marinade. As a marinade, it’s simple to apply — the sauce itself doubles as the seasoning, without a separate rub or brine needed first, since the salt, acid, and oil are already built in.
For grilled chicken specifically, that dual use means you can rub or brush the sauce onto the chicken before it goes on the grill, then drizzle extra sauce reserved separately over the finished pieces at the table. Since Leite’s recipe makes a full cup, setting some aside before it touches raw chicken is the simple way to have sauce for both jobs without reusing anything that contacted raw meat.
Every ingredient in this recipe is plant-based, which makes it a vegan and vegetarian sauce as published, and none of the five ingredients contain gluten, so it also works as a gluten-free condiment. It’s a useful one to have on hand if you’re grilling for a mixed group with different dietary needs, since it doesn’t need substitution to fit most restrictions.
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- Emeril Lagasse’s Essence: A Cajun-Creole Dry Rub
- Francis Mallmann’s Chimichurri, as Published by Saveur
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