Pri Pri Sauce

I'd repeatedly heard from my coeliac support group that Nando's sauce was gluten free, and craving some of that Nando's taste, included a bottle in my online grocery shopping only to find that it contained 'lactose' (the bane of the lactose intolerant, and an extract of milk for all out allergic people, like me) and was made "in a factory that handles everything your allergic to, why didn't you read the label?!".

So, no matter what anyone tells you, always read the label.

Fortunately, it's pretty easy to make pri pri sauce. The following is adapted from various online recipes and tweaked to resemble the Nando's label recipe, which adds some extra herbs, tomato paste and uses molasses instead of sugar. I've used vinegar instead of lemon juice since I had that to hand and the majority of recipes called for it, but if you're trying to duplicate Nando's, use the same quantity of lemon juice.

Ingredients: 

• Red chillies. This is a very personal taste, so use your best judgement for how hot you and your guests can handle it. I used some pre-chopped chillies which are a lot less hot than fresh so felt ok to use half a teaspoon, which was still not hot enough so I tossed in some Cayenne pepper later. 
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• half a teaspoon of molasses
• 1 tsp kosher salt (chunky sea salt)
• 1/2 tsp oregano
• 1/2 basil
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tbsp sweet paprika
• 1/4 tsp smoked paprika - this also adds heat. Factor this in when adding your chillies! You can skip this if you like, I just added it to give the sauce more depth.
• 100ml olive oil
• 50ml cider vinegar, or red or white wine vinegar.

Method:
Heat olive oil in a frying pan and gently fry the chillies, garlic and onion, then add the paprika. Add the tomato paste, and all other ingredients and simmer for 5 minutes, then allow the mixture to cool and put into jar. This recipe develops more flavour if it's left a day or two to mature but it can also be used straight away as a marinade.