We’ve been seeing piri piri popping up A LOT recently. It’s there on the menu at Cervos in Manhattan, Fat Rice in Chicago, and Kith and Kin in D.C. It’s showing up on salmon filets, roasted half chickens, calamari, rice, steaks, stews, and gooseberries, adding smoky-hot heat as a seasoning, marinade, and sauce for dipping and drizzling. We’ve gravitated to every corner that this vibrant, versatile flavor with South African and Portuguese roots has shown up, so naturally, we wanted to bring it home.
Enter senior food editor Molly Baz’s piri piri meatball—a light-in-texture, rich-in-flavor weeknight-friendly dinner that hinges on a quick blender sauce.
While piri piri is also the name of a particular hot chile pepper (imagine a habanero-level kick), you don’t actually need it to make delicious peri peri (also spelled peri peri) sauce. For this version, Molly picked fresh red Fresnos, which are easier to find than the more commonly used piri piri or African bird’s eye chiles. Their milder, slightly fruity heat goes great with the requisite smoked paprika and red bell pepper, which we like roasted and jarred. Mix this with garlic, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and salt, then blitz until smooth.
Most of the sauce will be used for drizzling, but Molly wanted to make sure that the meatballs themselves take on elements of that smoky-fruity flavor. So she created a panko-piri-piri paste that combines panko, water, an egg, and the sauce, plus oil, garlic, salt, cumin, and more paprika. All that gets mixed in with the beef, giving that warm, tingling zing a chance to come through on every bite.
You’ll have plenty of sauce to drizzle over the meatballs (which are best laid atop a cooling bed of yogurt), but you may even consider doubling the batch. It’s so good, you’ll find yourself spooning it over whatever miscellaneous foods you have lying around—roasted veggies, pasta, sandwiches… I mean, what did you expect?
