Homemade Asian basic chili paste (sambal tumis), red and hot post !!

You know I'm a Nasi Lemak Lover, I cannot live without spicy foods, especially Nasi Lemak, chicken curry, fried chicken & etc. So I use a lot of sambal (chilli paste), usually I prepare my own chilli paste and keep a big batch of chilli paste as is much easier than grind for small batch.

My style of chili paste is very basic, dried red chili, onion, garlic and shallot.

Normally I have frozen my batch of chilli paste in small container (2tbsp each container) and just snap pieces off when required. It defrost very quickly too.


The important point of getting a good sambal is to tumis (keep stirring) the raw chili paste with oil for very long hour as to get rid of the raw chili smell and get better chili fragrant. One of my Malay friend took 2hours to prepare her sambal, can you imagine!!

Homemade Asian basic chili paste (sambal tumis)
(printable recipe)

Ingredients A
300g dried red chili (cut 1” length and cooked in hot water for 10mins, remove seeds)
175ml water

Ingredients B
2 onions
10 shallots
10 cloves of garlic
50ml water

300ml cooking oil or more

1. Blend ingredients A till fine or paste texture, and set aside.
2. Blend ingredients B till fine or paste texture, and set aside.
3. Heat wok (without oil) over low flame, add in chili mixture, stir fry for 15mins.
4. Add in cooking oil, continue stir fry for another 15mins (at this time, the mixture is quite heavy and hard to stir)
5. Add in onion mixture, continue stir fry for 45mins or till oil separated from chili (at this time, the mixture is light and easy to stir)
6. Cool down completely before store in clean air tight container.Store in fridge or freezer.

My note:
I did not add any seasoning (salt,sugar & etc), belacan (shrimps paste), herbs or etc. So this basic chili paste can be used to cook chicken curry, fried Mamak noodles, fried chicken, fried fish, sweet sambal, sambal ikan bilis (anchovies) for nasi lemak and etc. You can adjust the amount of seasoning, add more shallots, onion or garlic, or to add shrimps paste or herbs, so it is very versatile, adjust according to your recipe. So this is very similar to the chili Boh that we use to buy from market here.
The best thing is I can reduce the cooking time, don't need to stir fry the chili paste while cooking, just add in and mix with other ingredients, easy and fast!!

Happy Cooking !!