Spice up your life!

Friday 27 March 2015

Things are hotting up in town this weekend – a new locally made chilli sauce is popping up in the market.

Pimata is a sauce cooked up by accountant Kerwin Mohun who has invested £60,000 to bring a taste of Mauritius to the Island.

Kerwin said: “I came to Jersey, I like hot food, I didn’t find anything suitable to quench my thirst for hot food, went to the market and bought every type of chilli, they are quite different to what we have in Mauritius, some were just sweet and I got this variety that I’d never had, made it, loved it. I always made more, filled it in jars and gave it to friends at work, they loved it and it went from there.”

It's taken Kerwin two years to get Pimata ready to market. It's made using Scotch bonnet - a small but very hot chilli pepper that he says is about 44 times hotter than Tabasco!

He said: "The product was in my head and in my kitchen in a little jam jar. We had to do everything from scratch. There is a lot of work involved, choosing the right jar, the right name, doing the testing, finding the right premises."

Kerwin has now opened a chilli kitchen next to the hairdressers in St John's village and plans to open to the public two or three days a week. But he hopes to sell outside of the Island too and has plans to export it back home to Mauritius.

He's also got another idea on the shelf - to make a seafood version using dried shrimp that he says will be hot, salty and shrimpy and will be geared more towards the Mauritian and Asian market.

Before that though he's he's taking his new product to market and will be giving people a chance to taste it on Saturday in the Central Market.

“This is the one product if they miss, they will never know what they are missing. But it’s pretty unique, I’m not claiming anything exraordinary, it’s simple chilli sauce, but it packs a punch.

"It’s saying I’m the new guy on the shelf, it’s as I made it, it’s as my father made it in his recipe, it’s screaming out I am hot.”