Ingredients · Spice

Bird's Eye Chile

Capsicum annuum · Solanaceae (nightshade family)

Bird's Eye Chile
A small, fierce chile — our lot runs 90,000 heat units, well above typical cayenne's 30,000 to 50,000, which is why the product it sits in is the hot one. Bird's eye is a Capsicum annuum variety native to Mexico that Spanish and Portuguese colonists, missionaries and traders carried to Southeast Asia in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, where it became a staple. It is easily confused with a look-alike C. frutescens chile, and the African piri piri is that different species, not this one.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
TasteSharp, clean, immediate heat with very little fruit behind it — intensity rather than flavour

How to use it

By the pinch. In Thai and Southeast Asian cooking, in hot sauces, and wherever heat is wanted without adding much flavour. Bloom it in fat. Taste between additions — at 90,000 units it builds fast and cannot be taken back out.

With food

Coconut milk. Lime and fish sauce. Chicken and prawns. Noodles. Garlic. Basil. Mango.

With spices

Lemongrass, galangal and kaffir lime leaf. Garlic and ginger. Black pepper. Coriander.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient.

Its story

Where it comes from

Native to Mexico as a variety of Capsicum annuum, and long naturalised across Southeast Asia. Our lot names no origin.

What happened

The bird in the name is literal enough: small wild chiles are spread by birds, which do not register capsaicin the way mammals do and pass the seeds intact. Its journey is the standard chile story run at speed — from Mexico, on Spanish and Portuguese ships, into the cooking of places that now seem unimaginable without it. Within about eighty years of 1492, chiles had reached Africa, Arabia, Goa, Sri Lanka, Malacca, the Philippines and the Balkans. Most of what the world thinks of as natively fiery cuisine became so in that one century.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

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