Mrs Mostert's chutney

If you're not from South Africa I might have to explain to you what Mrs Ball's is. It's a fruit chutney and the best chutney you will ever find in the whole wide world. Mrs Ball's chutney is part of being South African. It goes with any food. No South African home is complete without Mrs Ball's. If you're ever in South Africa, make sure you try it. Here's a picture so you know what you're looking for:

If you live in South Africa, you can skip ahead to another recipe, go bake some cookies or something because you don't need to make chutney. You can just go to Pick 'n Pay and buy bottles and bottles of the good stuff.

I don't live in South Africa anymore, you see. Now I know I can order it online, but I like a challenge in the kitchen and my empty Mrs Balls chutney bottle which my mom brought from SA was a good enough challenge to try and make my own.

Mrs Ball's recipe is known to be a secret recipe. Top Secret. So I didn't expect to find it on the internet when I googled it. What I did find was a Mrs Ball's facebook group. And I found my dad as a fan on this group! He loves chutney as much as I do. I think it's in the genes. I inherited it from him.

So having given up on finding the secret recipe I look around this group for fun, since I'm still a housewife with nothing to do some days. There I found a note. And in the note... was the recipe!! I couldn't believe it. I checked and checked again. I thought this must be a joke, somebody making up a recipe and posting it here. But then as someone wrote in the comments, they would still go out and buy their bottles of Mrs Ball's chutney. And I thought, yes, if I could I would also still buy the chutney instead of making it. I didn't expect my chutney to taste the same even with the same recipe.

And so this morning I made my first bottle of chutney.

The recipe says it makes 18 bottles. A little bit too much for me. So I divided it by 18 to make just one bottle. When I weighed out the fruit it was so little so I decided to double everything and make two bottles instead. Good thing I did, because in the end it did only make one bottle.

You can click here for the original 18 bottle recipe.

Or you can follow the reduced recipe with my own modifications and tips in brackets:

68 g dried peaches (I couldn't find peaches so I used dried mango instead. When I find dried peaches I will make it again.)

26 g dried apricots

- Soak overnight in 100 ml Brown Wine Vinegar. (I couldn't find brown wine vinegar so bought red wine vinegar. Is it the same?)

Next morning, cook the dried fruit in the vinegar in which it soaked until soft.

Drain and mince the fruit.

Add 270 g sugar and 56g onions, minced.

Add 12 g salt and 8 g cayenne pepper.

Add 200 ml brown wine vinegar and simmer 1 - 2 hours. (I did one hour)

At start of 1 hour:

At end of 1 hour:

Sterilize bottle and bottle and seal while still hot.

The chutney will thicken as it cools down. Mine is now a little bit too thick and sticky. Next time I will add more vinegar.

My first bottle of home made chutney! I tried it with some quiche for lunch. Tastes almost as good as the real thing!