- 5kg of red horn pepper. green works to, but it's gonna look weird
- 3kg of egg plant, classic purple kind
- you can vary this a bit, but usually the ration is 1:2 to 3:5
- 1 entire head of garlic
- 0.5 liter of vegetable, rapeseed or sunflower oil. basically any that doesn't have a strung flavor and has a high heat resistance
- chilli peppers to taste
- various spices to taste listed below
- sugar
- salt
Remove the seeds and stems from the red horn peppers, cut in chunks and boil in about 3 l of water, 4 dcl of alcohol vinegar, until they are soft. No peeling of skin or anything like that. Add salt to taste, but you can add more later.
Save a bit of the water this was cooked in.
Peel the eggplants, cut in halves lengthwise and bake on a baking sheet also until soft.
When everything is cooked, grind the peppers, the eggplants, the garlic and the chillies in a meat grinder to get the texture you want. Don't go too chunky or the eggplant bits end up too big and you really aren't gonna like the texture, but don't go to tiny either.
Add the vegetable oil and all the ground up bits to a large pot. Add 2+ tablespoons of sugar and salt. Cook it on a stove for about 2 hours, then start tasting it and adding more salt, sugar, maybe some chilli flakes depending on how you like it. If it's too runny, keep cooking until it reduces. If it gets too tick, add some of that cooking water you saved up.
You need mason jars. Most sizes are fine, but too small means you're gonna have a hard time storing it and too big means it might spoil once they are opened if you don't eat it fast enough.
While the ajvar is still hot, close to done, sterilize the jars by boiling them in water. Also heat up some vegetable oil to a high temp at the same time. Put in the ajvar while it's still hot and pour a tablespoon or two of the oil on top, so the whole top is covered. It won't mix. Cover all that with the jar lid.
Heat up the oven, then turn it off, and put the closed jars in. Keep them in overnight so they cool down. They should be sealed this way.
Really, storing is whatever jar preservation method you wanna use. This is just the one people use here.
When you want to eat the ajvar, open the jar and pour the oil out, or just mix it up with the ajvar. It doesn't affect flavor.