Best copycat Nandos sauce recipe?

[shaithis]

Anyone experimented with the various Nandos copycat sauces?

The store-bought ones are small and quite expensive and I wanted to make my own, what recipes have you found taste pretty close to the actual Nandos experience? (I like it HOT as well!)

[herulach]

The chicken, or the actual goop you pour over?

The chicken itself is pretty easy to a decent (and reasonably healthy) version of:
Juice of 2 lemons
tablespoon Sugar
tablespoon salt
about as much rice vinegar as juice
chillies to taste (I usually use 7 or 8 of the little red finger chillies as we usually have them in. If you want you could get piripiris I suppose).
About 3 cloves of garlic
a bit of ginger
some fresh coriander

Chuck it in a blender (or chop up really gfine and stir it if you're not lazy) trhen throw it over the top of a butterflied, skinned chicken (or thighs/legs) overnight. Cook in oven remembering its butterflied so will take a bit less time.

If I was going to have the sauces, to be honest I'd buy them, at least that way you can kid yourself about how much sugar/oil is in them rather than have a crap version because you can't bring yourself to use so much. We usually have that with a bit of a salad and some pittas.

[Ttaskmaster]

See if there's a South African food shop/importer nearby and/or find some Saffies to interrogate - Most of them will give you chapter and verse on Nandos and all manner of clone sauces, as well as how crap the UK outlets are.

You may find this of interest as a starting point: https://www.southafricanshop.co.uk/s..._category/2243

[herulach]

That place just sells nandos as far as I can see? This thread put it in my head so we had it for tea tonight, tried a bit of cholula chipotle sauce on it. Very nice combo.

[ik9000]

copycat sauce? Is that what you call it? I had the squits the other day. If I'd known there was a market for it I would have saved some and bottled it for you free of charge.

[Ttaskmaster]

That place just sells nandos as far as I can see?

They also sell Mama Africa's jalapeno, Peri-Peri and red chilli sauces, Steers, Wellingtons and Spur ranges, as well as carrying most of the Royco and Robertsons ranges.

Not sure how this compares with the Nandos shop prices, though.

I'm not massively into such stuff myself, as I generally eat nothing spicier than a Polo, heh heh...
But it seems the Nandos side is mostly just Peri-Peri with varying degrees of herbs, garlic and/or hot chilli/pepper?
Plenty of Peri-Peri options out there, though I generally find SA brand to be the best (especially if you're making your own biltong), so you could simply pick one and add anything you feel is missing...?