Strawberry Hot Sauce

On ice-cream, a sweet hot sauce is a great topping. The heat is a surprise, but the ice cream takes it away immediately. Before strawberry season closes, Master Indian Spice wanted to present a sauce, versions of which we've made every berry season for the past three years for friends and family, that we've grown to love.

Strawberry Hot Sauce Ingredients

2 cups strawberries, well-rinsed and hulled

1 tbsp lal mirch or Indian red chili powder

1/4 cup sugar

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1 1/2 tbsp corn starch

1 cardamom pod, crushed

Strawberry Hot Sauce Method

1. Crush hulled strawberries, and heat over medium heat in a small saucepan

2. Mix corn starch with some of the crushed strawberry and the lemon juice

3. Once the crushed strawberry starts to boil, add sugar, chili powder, cardamom, and cornstarch mix, stirring continuously.

4. Let cool and serve over ice cream or a strawberry shortcake.

There are a lot of peppers you can use in a sauce like this, but there are some you can't. We've used Indian powder because it's very hot, and it has a fruitier flavour compared to, say, cayenne. We've made this recipe a few times with ghost or scorpion peppers, which sounds scary, but in fact the hotter peppers go extremely well with this kind of sauce because of their strong floral overtones and because you can use less of them to make the sauce spicy.