How to make basic dried chili paste, a super quick, ultra versatile base ingredient for Malay and Southeast Asian recipes.

Watch the video for the steps to make Basic Dried Chilli Paste.

Dried Chili paste is also known as cili giling/cili kisar/lada kisar/cili boh, and is a base ingredient for a lot of Malay dishes. It is a blended paste made of dried chillies, and can be bought these days in our local supermarkets. I prefer making my own, because:

1. it’s easy, and

2. the store bought ones often have salt and sometimes vinegar, as a form of preservative.

This is a key ingredient in Malay cooking, and seems intimidating to make, but I am going to demystify it here for you. It’s really quite straightforward!

I usually whip up a big batch and keep in the fridge so I always have some on hand. This can keep up to two weeks or so in the fridge. You can freeze the chilli paste to have it last even longer.

This recipe yields about 1/2 a cup of dried chilli paste. Generally, for a recipe that serves 4 people, I would use this amount of dried chilli paste.

The amount required would depend on the recipe – as well as your spice tolerance! Don’t think you have to absolutely follow a recipe’s measurements. For my recipes, I generally stick to a medium spice tolerance, although even then it might be too spicy for some people. Always adjust according to your spice tolerance.

Just a few recipes that use dried chilli paste include Sambal Prawns, Spicy Tomato Chicken, and Mee Goreng.

3-Ingredient Paste

Now my particular recipe is not quite traditional – but it most certainly cuts a couple of extra steps in cooking. This is my mom’s recipe, and for a long time, I thought this was how ALL dried chilli paste was made. You can make basic dried chilli paste with just dried chillies and water… But mine has two extra ingredients: onions and garlic.

“Why are you making me do more and add more???” Hear me out.

100% of my (and most Malay recipes out there) recipes that use dried chilli paste will require onions and garlic. Adding these two ingredients in the blending process means that you can essentially leave out the onions and garlic when you’re cooking a dish. I sometimes do that, though I have added additional onions and garlic to the pan when I’m sauteeing and it never hurt the dish.

By the way, my Mom also likes to also add other ingredients to the blender such as ginger, galangal and lemongrass… it depends on what she wants to clear in the fridge!

I don’t make dried chilli paste ANY other way, and never needed to. However, if you want an actually basic version, then simply leave out the onion and garlic, and you will have just-dried-chillies dried chilli paste.

Type of Dried Chilli

The key ingredient is dried chilies, and they’re usually sold in Asian grocery stores in big bags. In Singapore (and Malaysia and Indonesia), there is usually one type of dried chilli that is readily available. They can be the Spur, Byadgi, or Kashmiri variety, and are used interchangeably throughout Southeast Asia and India. These are usually long, wrinkly and curly.

Frankly, we don’t care (nor realise) that there are different types of red chillies. I even dare to venture for most of us here, there are only three kinds of chillies available: Red Chillies, Green Chillies, and Thai Bird’s Eye Chillies (Cili Padi).

I do realise that our Western counterpart are blessed with a variety of chilli peppers. Alternatives for the red chillies that we use would be Fresno and Serrano chillies. Any other type of medium-hot chilli would do fine, it is all up to your spice preference and tolerance. In fact, I’ve tried to make a chilli paste this with dried pepperoncini chilli peppers I bought from Italy, and it turned out beautiful.

How to Prep the Dried Chillies

To use dried chillies as a base paste ingredient, they would need to be soaked in water and rehydrated first. There are a lot of different ways of rehydrating – and they are all correct.

For all the methods, the chillies are ready for blending once it rehydrates – that’s when it looks more plump and straightened out than before.

Method #1: Soak in Room Temperature Water

Give dried chillies a quick rinse.

To dried chillies, pour in room temperature water and allow to soak for at least 1 hour, or until the dried chillies soften and rehydrate.

Once the dried chillies rehydrate, drain the liquid. Dried chillies are ready for use.

Method #2: Soak Dried Chillies in Boiling Water

Give the dried chillies a quick rinse and add to a heatproof bowl. Get some water boiling – you can simply use a kettle for this.

Once boiling, pour the water over the dried chillies, making sure there is enough to submerge the chillies. Allow the chillies to soak for about 10 minutes, or until it rehydrates. Drain off the liquid. Dried chillies are ready for use.

This method is highlighted in this recipe and is also my preferred technique. I consider it to be the easiest and most foolproof method.

Method #3: Boil to Cook

Give the dried chillies a quick rinse. To a pot, add enough water to submerge the chillies. Turn on the heat and let it come to a boil.

Once the water is a rolling boil, add the dried chillies. Allow the dried chillies to boil for about 4-5 minutes, or until it rehydrates. Warning: you might sneeze a bit from the spicy fumes!

Drain the liquid or remove the chillies from the pot. Chillies are ready for use.

Using Water vs Oil

When blending the dried chillies into a paste, you will need to add some sort of liquid to help it move along easier. Both liquids work for dried chilli paste.

With oil, it is said to allow the dried chilli paste to have a longer shelf life.

My go-to is water (boiled water, not tap water). Simply because the dried chillies are already rehydrated with water, therefore I needed less water to oil to get it moving. I also prefer working with water because washing up is a lot less tedious than with oil. I do not enjoy washing up an oiled-up blender.

There is one situation where I would use oil, that is when I’m purposefully blending up the dried chillies to make Sambal as a condiment. With dried chilli paste used as a base ingredient as a dish, you actually do not need to use as much oil. However, when cooked to make sambal, it will benefit from more oil to get a thorough cook-through.

How long does this keep?

As mentioned, this can keep up to two weeks or so in the fridge.

You can freeze the chilli paste to have it last even longer. You can use ice cube moulds but you want to make sure you don’t need them for anything else ever since the smell will stick. I love my dried chillies, just not as an ice cube flavour. Instead, I would portion the dried chilli paste into small Ziploc bags. These can flatten easily so I can “file” these away in my freezer.

If you see white mold on the dried chilli paste however, obviously discard! Additionally, give it a whiff and it should not smell sour or bad.

Turning this into Sambal

Another awesome benefit of adding onions and garlic: it makes for amazingly quick sambal chilli paste. A dollop of this sautéed in oil and seasoned with salt and sugar and *boom* you have ultra flavourful sambal.

If you want a bit more technically speaking:

1. Stir fry two tablespoons of the dried chili paste in a pan with three to four tablespoons of oil. Keep a low heat so that the chillies do not burn.

2. Sauté until the chili paste “splits oil” – that is when it has dried and turned a darker hue, and the oil has turned red. If you used lots of oil, the red oil would be floating on top of the chilli paste.

(For more information on this oil splitting process, see post: How to Cook Dried Chilli Paste | “Pecah Minyak” or ‘Oil Splitting’)

3. Add 1/2 teaspoon each of salt and sugar, or to taste. Done!

More Resources

Ready to embark on your sambal making journey? Check out these posts:

How to Cook Dried Chilli Paste | “Pecah Minyak” or ‘Oil Splitting’
Versatile, Basic Sambal
How to make Sambal Tumis
The BEST Sambal for Nasi Lemak! (a TOP hit on this blog!)

Ingredients:

– 20g or about 20 Dried Chillies

– 1 Red Onion or 3-4 shallots

– 4 cloves of Garlic

– 1/4 cup of Water

This recipe makes for four tablespoons of Dried Chilli Paste.

Directions:

1. Wash the dried chillies.

2. Place dried chillies in a heatproof bowl, and add boiling water to the bowl. Let it sit for about 10 minutes, or until the chillies rehydrate.

3. Place rehydrated chillies in a blender – you can cut into smaller pieces for easier blending – along with shallots or onions, garlic and water.

4. Finely blend to a paste.