If you’re a fan of peanuts and bold flavours, then this is a sauce you’re going to want to slather all over anything you can get your hands on. It’s a super-simple sauce that’s packed with complex flavours, so will be sure to impress anyone who didn’t watch you make it! 😛 For me, it’s the perfect accompaniment to corn fritters, so move over sweet chilli sauce, and make way for a mouthwatering peanutty dip that demands a serious plate-swiping!

Add to your sauce-n-dips repertoire and sensationalise your next finger-food offering with this sauce that’ll elicit a Pavlovian drool response the next time you think about making it…

Flavour: Spicy, salty and tangy

Yield: Enough dip to go with one batch of nibblies to feed 12 (or just enough for myself and The Robert to pig out on as a late-night snack)

Ingredients:

• 4 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter
• juice of half a lime
• 4 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 clove garlic
• 4 bird’s eye chillies
• 1 tablespoon sugar – I use rapadura or palm sugar for their deep, dark flavour
• 1 cup of water

Directions:

1. Mince the garlic as finely as you can, and chop up your chillies – add these to a medium-sized bowl
   • Tip: to get your garlic so finely minced it’s almost a paste, the trick is to slice it finely with a really sharp knife, then chop it roughy, sprinkle a little bit of salt over it, and keep chopping until the salt reduces the garlic to a paste-like consistency (shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes all up, and well worth it for infusing garlic throughout your dish and making it super-smooth)
2. Stir in the sugar, lime juice and soy sauce – make sure the sugar is dissolved before you move to the next step
3. Add the peanut butter, and stir until you have a thick paste
4. Add the water to your sauce gradually, stirring as you go until you have a thick but pourable consistency
5. Serve immediately with crunchy nibbles or over a salad of shredded Asian vegetables
   • Tip: leftover sauce (sacrilege, to be honest, but I concede that it can happen…) can be brought back to life by just adding a bit of water and stirring it back to its original consistency