Peri Peri Sauce for Portuguese Chicken or Grilled Shrimp

Peri Peri Sauce. Garlicky, spicy, lemony, tangy and utterly addictive. This bright, fresh, fully-flavoured version hits all the right notes.

Update below. Peri Peri Chicken Wings & Chicken Burger! 

My confession is that I had never tried peri peri sauce before. It is a sauce that originated in Portugal and then went on a long trip to several parts of Africa where it also became incredibly popular.

It's based on the peri peri chili or African Bird's Eye Chili where it gets it's flavourful heat, adding several herbs and spices plus plenty of lemony tanginess to balance the sauce.

Peri Peri Sauce is at the centre of the incredible success of the Nando's restaurant franchise which has been an overwhelming success in many parts of the world and particularly in the UK.

There, it is now ingrained into the modern day culinary culture there. People seem to be addicted to "going for a Nando's", once or twice a week in many cases.

Not in my neck of the woods.

There is no Nando's restaurant franchise any where near where I live but I had the opportunity to try it on a recent visit to Ottawa and began to understand the addictive nature of peri peri sauce on flame grilled chicken.

As always happens in these cases, I determined to make my own version of the sauce, attempting to equal or better the flavour of Nando's famous chicken. I bought a couple of bottles of their sauce to take home as a way to compare my peri peri sauce version to theirs, side-by-side.

There are a LOT of recipes online for peri peri sauce and I read and tried several of them before tweaking my own recipe to get the flavour just right.

Finding the right Peri Peri Sauce flavours

First of all, I had little hope of finding the authentic Bird's Eye Chilis here in St. John's, so I substituted small Thai red chilis which are more readily available most places. They are only about half as  spicy as the peri peri chilis but I used a fair amount of them and it worked well.

Since I wanted to bottle my sauce after cooking it quickly, I used roasted red peppers as a base for the sauce along with grilled onions to boost the smoky flavour, add a little sweetness, and give the sauce more body so that it would be more brush-able.

Tasting Nando's sauce from the bottle, like many commercially prepared sauces, I found it overly salty. I cut back a lot on the salt in the recipe,  figuring that people would be doing their own seasoning on the chicken before cooking anyway.

This also worked particularly well and I was absolutely delighted with the outcome of my experiment.

The result!

The kids loved it, particularly Noah who, like me, is more inclined toward spicy foods. The real surprise though was Spouse! She doesn't normally like things that are particularly spicy but she declared this to be the best chicken I had ever made!

That's quite something to say considering the hundreds of chicken recipes that are present on this website!

Nando's offers their sauce in several versions from medium heat to extra hot but the good news is you can make it just how you like it, simply by adding more or less of the small thai red chilis to the recipe to easily control the heat level.

Since I bottled this such last week, we have had the peri peri chicken twice and even had peri peri chicken burgers using boneless skinless chicken breasts for a quick dinner idea. I guess our family obsession with peri peri chicken is well underway.

August 2017 & 2020 updates:

My latest obsession with this very flavourful and spicy sauce is to use it on grilled chicken wings. I have been using it on them all summer and absolutely loving it!  

In that case I forgo any marinating beforehand and start grilling the wings to seal the skin on both sides after seasoning with only a little salt.

I grill them over medium high heat, so as not to cook them too quickly and I begin brushing on the sauce and turning them every 4-5 minutes. I like to get a good 3 coats on each side for maximum peri peri sauce flavour.

At last sitting I paused to take a couple of photos before polishing off the entire plate above myself. They are THAT addictive! Even writing about them now makes me want them again!

We have also been enjoying this sauce on marinated grilled chicken breasts which make most excellent chicken burgers. You'll definitely want to try that idea.

2021 update: Most recently, I have been using this sauce on grilled centre loin pork chops. They are some of the best chops I've ever eaten. Absolutely delicious.

I only took a quick shot of the chops on my phone but will replace it with a better one next time.

One of my new favourite ways to use to use this peri peri sauce is again on grilled shrimp, this time as part of a delicious surf and tyrf dinner! Surf and Turf is now one of my Fathers Day traditions and this version is poutstanding!

Looking for more tasty chicken dinner ideas?

Be sure to check out this newly updated collection of Our Top Ten Chicken Dinners from more than a decade online. These have been made literally millions of times and get the best reviews from our followers.

Updated July 2020.

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Peri Peri Sauce for Portugese Chicken

Yield: 16 servings. About 3 cups sauce

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Cook Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 1 hour

Peri Peri Sauce should be garlicy, spicy, lemony, tangy and utterly addictive. This bright, fresh, fully-flavoured version hits all the right notes.

Print

Ingredients

• 2 large red bell peppers, char grilled
• 1 large red onion, char grilled
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• ½ cup lemon juice
• ¼ cup red wine vinegar, or apple cider vinegar
• zest of one lemon, finely grated
• 10 small red Thai chilis, roughly chopped (more or less to taste for hotter or milder sauce). You may want to start with 5 chilis only)
• 1 ½ teaspoon smoked paprika, or plain paprika
• 1 ½ teaspoon dried oregano
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 ½ teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon black pepper

To finish the sauce (when cooked)

Toggle ingredient group

• ¼ cup lemon juice
• zest of one lemon, finely minced
• ¼ cup red wine vinegar, or apple cider vinegar
• ½ cup extra virgin olive oil

Instructions

1. Start by roasting the red peppers and onions. This can be done on a gas grill, under the broiler or on a cast iron grill pan. You want to get good char marks on the outside of the peppers and onions. Don't worry if they are not fully cooked, they will get fully cooked in the sauce.
2. Chop the peppers and onions and add them to a food processor or blender. You can us an immersion blender if that is all you have on hand, just take the time to get the ingredients well pureed.
3. Add the garlic, lemon juice, red wine vinegar, lemon zest, red Thai chilis, smoked paprika, oregano, salt and pepper to the food processor with the grilled onions and peppers and puree until smooth.
4. Transfer the sauce to a medium saucepan, add the bay leaves and simmer slowly for 20-30 minutes.
5. Let the sauce cool to warm. Remove the bay leaves then return the sauce to the food processor again.
6. Add the additional lemon juice, red wine vinegar and lemon zest. Puree for another few minutes until very smooth. Slowly add in the olive oil in a thin stream as the processor is running.

Notes

To make Peri Peri Chicken, brush a little of the sauce onto all sides of the chicken you are using. You can use bone in, skin on chicken or boneless skinless chicken. Place the chicken pieces in a glass dish and cover with plastic wrap.Let the chicken marinate for several hours or overnight.

Grill over low heat on a glass grill until fully cooked, brushing on additional sauce in the last five to ten minutes of cook time. Serve with extra sauce for dipping at the table.

The nutritional information provided is automatically calculated by third party software and is meant as a guideline only. Exact accuracy is not guaranteed. For recipes where all ingredients may not be used entirely, such as those with coatings on meats, or with sauces or dressings for example, calorie & nutritional values per serving will likely be somewhat lower than indicated.

Nutrition Information

Yield

16

Serving Size

g
Amount Per Serving Calories 136Total Fat 10gSaturated Fat 2gTrans Fat 0gUnsaturated Fat 8gCholesterol 18mgSodium 240mgCarbohydrates 4gFiber 1gSugar 2gProtein 7g

The nutritional information provided is automatically calculated by third party software and is meant as a guideline only. Exact accuracy is not guaranteed. For recipes where all ingredients may not be used entirely, such as those with coatings on meats, or with sauces or dressings for example, calorie & nutritional values per serving will likely be somewhat lower than indicated.

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