Let's talk about how to make chili sauce, shall we?

Paprika is a spice made from dried red peppers that are ground into a powder. Depending on what type of paprika it is, it'll be made from a different variety of red pepper. It has a sweet, pungent, earthy, and somewhat fruity flavor, and varying levels of heat, ranging from the most common very-mild type to the less popular pretty-hot. Good paprika should have a pronounced aroma that you'll notice when you take a whiff from the jar, and it needs to be thrown out after six months as it will lose its potency over time.

If you don't have any paprika in the house, you can use any number of alternate spices, as long as you realize that the flavor of the final product won't taste the same as it would with the sweet paprika. Use nutmeg, cinnamon or cloves instead of paprika in a deviled egg or potato salad recipe. Replace the paprika in chili with mace, mustard, garlic powder or cumin, or use ground ginger or black pepper instead of paprika in your favorite fried rice recipe.

This is unlike a Sweet Chili Sauce, which is a Thai sweet chili sauce great with Asian cuisine.