The Palm oil Sauce Experience.

How To Prepare A Sexy Palm-oil Pepper sauce.

This is one of my favorite sauces, its easy, delicious and just as long as you prepare it well, it would go well with almost anything. Yes, anything even with your bread because it would taste so good you wont remember you had used palm-oil (aka red oil) to prepare it. The sauce depends on your taste for fish or meat, you could use fish, smoked fish, dried fish, red meat, shrimps, sausages, chicken, turkey, cow leg, cow tail, cow tongue and so on. For those who consider themselves vegetarians or just feel like ‘NO MEAT’ for a while, you could use mushrooms. If you are an ‘OLIVER TWIST’ you could use them all. I would show you how to prepare the sauce with smoked fish and turkey.

Ingredients:

One more thing before I start up the list, I have to tell you….. I’m bad with measurements, I rarely measure, I just gauge with my eyes and I hope my readers are not too dumb to use their heads too, you cant be a bad cook and also dumb too, please NO. Its also nice that your vegetables are fresh and refrigerated till you’re ready to use/

·      Tomatoes = 6 large red tomatoes

·      Hot Chilly Pepper/  Ata Rodo(Yoruba) = 8 to 10 small pieces

·      Large bell Pepper/ Tatase(Yoruba) =  2 large reds

·      Onions = 2 to 3 large ones

·      Palm oil = 2 to 3 cooking spoons

·      Smoked fish (Titus or Sardine or Mackerel etc ) = 3 or as much as you want cut in pieces

·      Powdered garlic (optional)

·      Thyme (dried and shredded)

·      Salt to taste = 1 full table spoon

·      Cooking cubes (I’m a fan of Knor cubes) = 1 twin cubes

Others;

·      Water

·      Cooking pot

·      Bowls = Place ingredients in them

·      Blender = For pepper

·      Etc

Preparation

1.     Put you almost perfectly combined pepper together and wash them clean along with one large onion.

2.     Put them in the blending or grinding  machine , add some water and blend to consistency of your choice or put them in a shredder to have them shredded to your choice.

3.     If you are worried about the pepper seeds, you can seed them before blending, grinding or shredding or you could boil them all to soften the seeds if you are that paranoid.

4.     Place the blended pepper aside and cut the remaining onions into 4 to 6 parts each.

5.     Turn on the cooker and place your cooking pot on it, make sure the heat is just enough so you don’t set the house ablaze.

6.     Pour the palm oil in the hot pot and just as soon as the oild starts to dissolve you add the first  onion you cut to fry. This would prevent the palm oil from choking you and make the oil more palatable especially for your digestion. It’s a way of frying the oil. You could either cover or leave the pot uncovered. Better uncovered so you could the interior of the pot.

7.     Clean the fish by taking out all the rubbish and bones in them. You could break them with your hands into pieces or cut them with a knife and drench them in salted water.

8.     Check the onions frying in the pot that they’ve turned burned brown, take them out with a sieve-like cooking spoon so its only the onions you take out. Add the other fresh onions left to fry.

9.     As soon as the second group of onions has been fried dark brown you take them out and drain the water in the fish.

10. Put the fish in the hot palm oil to fry a little bit to reduce breaking to flavor the oil some more and also get some onion flavor into the fish.

11. After frying the fish, you take the fish out completely.

12. In five seconds you pour the pepper into the hot oil and leave the pot uncovered. Don’t be scared if a little fire comes out the pot, that’s perfectly normal but don’t always anticipate fire.

13. You would notice that the grey smoke would reduce and finally stop. Watch your fry and inhale the delicious aroma.

14. Add the thyme into the pepper as it fries and cooks just so it can soften up. Watch as the oil gradually becomes visible the more it fries the pepper.

15. When the oils is more at the top of the pepper you add your cooking cube and stair it. Taste the oil and not the pepper to be sure you added just enough and not too much, you remember that the fish had been salted already.

16. Taste the pepper and when you get a smooth taste you can be sure its time to add the fried smoked fish. Add the fish and stair well to evenly distribute the pepper into the fish. Cover the pot to get some steam to increase infusion.

17. Check back in two minutes and taste the pepper this time, the salt should be enough, if needed you could add one or two pinches of salt. Taste again.

18. Cover pot and wait another five minutes with the heat turned down to avoid overcooking or burning.

19. Sefini. You should have a very red looking, great smelling and tasting sauce ready. Some oil would float at the top of the pepper and fish. The excess oil could be eaten with anything should incase the sauce is exhausted before the oil.

20. Serve with rice, yam, bread, eggs, perfumed rice etc.

Enjoy!

Should incase you would be substituting your fish with meat you have to season/spice and boil the meat or poultry till its tender, keep the broth frozen as you wouldn’t need to use, fry the meat or poultry in the hot oil like how the fish was done above by following the number 10 instruction and continue from there.

Note:
The magic with combining peppers and other vegetables for any delicacy is good ratio combination, the more red you add to you pepper selection the redder sauce/stew/food you would produce.

Where you are one of those who are obsessed with red red red food you can always add the  uncommon Shombo/Bawa pepper known as Cayenne or cow-horn pepper to your combination. You would also derive a very lovely aroma when you combine vegetables well. Try as much as possible to avoid vegetables like tomatoes that have been left in the sun as it would produce a sour taste. The sun would also have sapped the nutrients in them too.

Where you have 1 large tomato you make use of  2 to 3 rodo peppers (more or less on how hot you want your sauce to be) and I large tatase. So when cooking a large portion you can do your maths and combine nicely.