Our Family’s Vietnamese Chili Sauce
Watch the video tutorial reel -here-.
Growing up, there was always chili sauce around when we ate phở. This is our family’s version of Vietnamese chili sauce, or tương ớt—spicy, garlicky, tangy, and made to add just the right amount of heat to a bowl of phở.
While a lot of people associate sriracha with Vietnamese food, tương ớt is its own thing. One ingredient you’ll find in some Vietnamese chili sauce recipes that you don’t normally associate with sriracha is tomato.
The tomatoes are important here. They add a subtle natural sweetness and fruitiness, give the sauce a little more body, and help round out the sharp heat of the chilies without making the finished sauce overly sweet.
For the peppers, don’t worry about using only one variety. Traditionally, you’ll often see red chilies used like fresno or Thai bird chilis, but our family recipe works with whatever chilies we have available. Thai bird chilies, Fresnos, red jalapeños—or a combination of different peppers all work. You can even throw in a few yellow or green chilies; just keep the majority red if you want that beautiful orange-red color.
The result is a simple homemade chili sauce that’s spicy, tangy, savory, and especially good with phở—but I put it on just about everything.
Ingredients
1 lb red chili peppers, or a mix of chili peppers
1/3 lb fresh tomatoes
4 garlic cloves
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 1/4 cups vinegar
1/3 cup water
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon red chili powder
1 tsp MSG (optional for extra umami)
Directions
1. Prep the chilies.
Wash the chili peppers, remove the stems, and roughly chop them. You can use the entire pepper, including the seeds, for a hotter sauce.
2. Blend everything together.
Add the chilies, tomatoes, garlic, brown sugar, kosher salt, vinegar, water, and cornstarch to a blender.
Blend until everything is completely broken down and you have a relatively smooth sauce.
3. Simmer the sauce.
Transfer the blended mixture to a saucepan and bring it to a gentle simmer.
Add the fish sauce and red chili powder and stir to combine.
4. Cook for 5 minutes.
Let the sauce gently simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. It will begin to thicken slightly and the flavors will come together.
If you prefer a silky-smooth chili sauce, you can pass it through a fine-mesh strainer after cooking. For a thicker, more rustic sauce, leave it as is.
*If you want a more reddish color, you can add a natural red food dye to this as well but traditionally this has more of an orange color.
5. Cool and bottle.
Allow the chili sauce to cool before transferring it to a clean bottle or jar. Keep refrigerated.
You can eat it right away, but I actually like it even better after it sits in the refrigerator for a few days. Give it 2–5 days and the garlic, vinegar, chilies, fish sauce, and tomato start to meld together and develop a deeper, more complex tang.
Then put it on everything and keep refrigerated!
A Note on the Tomatoes
Don’t skip the tomatoes.
They may seem like an unusual hot sauce ingredient, but tomatoes are used in some Vietnamese tương ớt recipes. They give the sauce body and a subtle fruitiness while adding just enough natural sweetness to soften the intensity of the chilies.
Instead of simply tasting like pure heat and vinegar, you get a chili sauce that feels much more rounded and balanced.
And for me, that’s what makes this taste like the chili sauce we grew up eating with phở.