Last week, 30 Food Weekly readers had a feast taste-testing more than 100 chilli sauces to decide the best homemade version. By Shanthini Naidoo Some like it hot. Some like it not so hot, but packed with flavour. Others prefer sweetness, herbs, garlic. They lean towards Portuguese or Indian, or a unique blend of South African sizzle.Whatever their preference, 30 avid Food Weekly readers had a feast taste testing more than 100 chilli sauces.In the end, the Best Tasting Chilli Sauce competition winner was Ouma's Fiery Sauce by Kay Naicker from Maidstone in Tongaat, north of Durban.The garlicky, hot, tart and all-round delicious sauce won by a mile.Food Weekly readers were thrilled to join the tasting on a wintry Joburg morning.story_article_left1Neil Sanford, John Knowlton and Angus McCallum-Brown were a formidable triumvirate who deliberated long and professionally over each sauce. They found that many of the jars in their batch erred on the side of sweetness, being more like chilli jam than a savoury sauce with layers of depth.Only once did their attention wander - when a fermented bottle was opened by the team sitting opposite and its contents exploded all over Carlos de Oliveira and Lusanda Ntintili.De Oliveira good-naturedly mopped the Jackson Pollock painting off his shirt and his bald head and everyone got back to concentrating after some enthusiastic descriptions: "It blew up like a chemistry set in a kid's school project," said Knowlton. "Like a homemade volcano," said Sanford."Yes, a bottle exploded all over me, ruined my shirt, but the tasting was divine," said hairdresser De Oliveira.Between tasting, palate cleansers of yogurt and water were encouraged.A red-faced and perspiring McCallum-Brown put the cooling yogurt to good use. "There was one sauce that came back to get me. Overall, most were delicious. I also thought two of our top sauces would have been a best-seller if we mixed them together."It was not all about heat and flavour, though. Ntintili said she took into account what the sauce maker was trying to achieve. "I tried to be fair about the intention. If it was called a relish, then it was allowed to be thicker. Portuguese was more garlicky."Although some sounded like it, the judges were not experts, just chilli lovers who are passionate about what they eat. A few do take their chilli seriously, such as reader Mohan Singh, who imports sauces from around the world. He says: "I am a chilli sauce freak, I eat it on everything, including my sandwiches. I sprinkle chilli powder on fruit, mangoes and pineapples. I order sauces online. Right now, I love a Korean sauce, which is really hot, and a sauce called Scorpion from Cape Town. I don't think chilli should be sweet, but flavourful." He rated the winner 10 out of 10.The youngest judge, Ian Samson, 17, who formed a team with his father Richard and fellow chilli fan Gloria Smuts, is also a collector of sauces. Ian said he had become mildly obsessed with the very hot stuff. "A sauce I buy online, the Chilliehead 2014 vintage, is my favourite at the moment," he said. - Additional reporting by Sue de Groot..