If you are interested check out other Indo-Chinese recipes in my blog.
Schezwan Sauce Recipe:
Yields 1.5 cups of sauce
Prep time: 10 mins | Cooking time: 15 mins | Total time: 25 mins
Cuisine: Chinese/Indo-Chinese | Category: Sauces
Ingredients:
10-15 medium sized Garlic pods, peeled
10-12 Red chillies(I used Byadige variety)
3 tbsp. finely chopped Garlic
1 tbsp. finely chopped Ginger
1 tbsp. finely chopped Celery(or thick Coriander stems)
2 large Tomatoes, roughly chopped
1 tbsp. Tomato Sauce(optional)
1 tsp Soya Sauce
1 tbsp. Vinegar
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp White(or Black) Pepper powder
Salt to taste
2-3 tbsp. Oil
Method:
- Remove the stems of red chillies and soak them in warm water for half an hour. You can even remove the seeds if you cannot bear the heat.
- Grind the soaked red chillies with garlic pods to a fine paste.
- Grind chopped tomatoes to a smooth puree.
- Heat oil in a pan/kadai and add finely chopped garlic and sauté it nicely for a minute. Add finely chopped ginger and celery and sauté nicely until the raw smell of all the ingredients go away.
- Add pureed tomatoes and let it simmer for a while and then add ground red chili- garlic paste and fry nicely until the raw smell of tomatoes and red chili- garlic paste goes away and it leaves the oil in the edges
- Add tomato sauce(if using), vinegar, soya sauce, sugar, white(or black) pepper powder and salt and mix nicely and let it simmer for another 2-3 minutes. The sauces do have certain amount of salt, so add salt accordingly.
- If the sauce is very thick you can add some water and simmer again to get a thick sauce consistency of your requirement. I usually keep it thick so that it can be stored well for sometime.
- Cool the sauce and store it in an air tight container in refrigerator. You can easily keep it for a week in refrigerated when no water is added to it.
Use the sauce according to your requirement in the recipe.
Notes:
- You can avoid tomatoes in the recipe and increase the tomato sauce to 3-4 tbsp. I usually do not like to add more tomato sauce as it makes the sauce very sweet and hence I prefer adding pureed tomatoes and just a dash of tomato sauce for added taste.
- Make sure you fry all the ingredients well until their raw smell disappears which makes the sauce taste better.
- You can use Schezwan sauce in various recipes like Schezwan fried rice, Noodles, Vegetables, Schezwan Tofu, Schezwan Paneer, Dosa and various snack varieties.
- If you do not have celery in hand use finely chopped thick stems of coriander leaves(only stems, not leaves) instead. It works nice.
- If you like you can add 1/2 tsp Ajinamoto in the recipe. I usually do not add it for health reasons.
- Byadige chillies are less spicy and hence I prefer to add it. If you are using regular red chillies reduce the number of red chillies to 5-6 based on the spiciness of chillies. If you are not confident about the spiciness you can even remove the seeds and use, it will reduce the spiciness to a greater extent.
