Ingredients · Spice

Chile

Capsicum annuum · Solanaceae (nightshade family)

Chile
Dried chile peppers, whole, crushed or ground — the generic heat in twenty-nine products here, from curry powders to jerk to Tex-Mex. Heat comes from capsaicin and is measured in Scoville heat units; the shop's blends name theirs where the supplier gives a figure. The named single chiles each have their own character and their own entry: ancho is raisiny and mild, guajillo bright and tannic, chipotle smoked, cayenne clean and fierce, gochugaru fruity and sweet. Where a label just says chiles, it is usually a blend chosen for heat rather than for flavour.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromMexico (native range)
TasteHeat first, then a dry, fruity red-pepper taste; the darker dried chiles run raisiny and the lighter ones bright and tannic

How to use it

Toast whole dried chiles in a dry pan and soak them for a paste. Bloom ground chile in fat, not at the end. In chili, taco seasoning, curry powder, jerk, harissa, berbere and ras el hanout. Add heat in stages: it builds, and cannot be taken back out.

With food

Beef, pork and chicken. Beans and corn. Tomato. Chocolate. Lime. Dairy — yogurt, sour cream and cheese all blunt it. Mango and pineapple. Peanut.

With spices

Cumin and oregano for Tex-Mex. Garlic and onion. Paprika, which brings colour without heat. Coriander and turmeric in curry. Allspice and thyme for jerk. Cocoa for mole.

With tea

Anything with body and a little sweetness — Assam, rooibos, a spiced chai. Green tea and mint between mouthfuls.

Its story

Where it comes from

Chile peppers were first grown in central-east Mexico; preceramic remains were found in the Tehuacan Valley, and the wild ancestor's modelled range puts it there around six thousand years ago, though the remains themselves have never been directly dated. Cayenne-type peppers are tied to French Guiana, where Indigenous peoples grew them long before European contact. Shop notes name no lot origin.

What happened

Columbus and his crew called capsicum fruits pimientos, peppers, because they burned like black pepper — and the name stuck in nearly every language it reached, for a fruit that is not related to pepper at all. Diego Alvarez Chanca, the physician on the second voyage, brought the first chiles to Spain in 1494. Within eighty years Portuguese and Spanish ships had carried them to Africa, Arabia, Goa, Sri Lanka, Malacca, the Philippines and the Balkans, where they became paprika. Almost every cuisine the world now thinks of as natively hot became so in that century. Because they were cheap and easy to grow, chiles became the poor man's pepper, a stand-in for costly black pepper. In Texas in the 1890s a saloon cook named Willie Gebhardt began importing ancho chiles by the wagonload from San Luis Potosi and grinding them so his chili would taste the same all year; he trademarked Eagle Brand Chili Powder in 1896. Two hundred miles north, DeWitt Clinton Pendery had been advertising his own chile blend since 1890, and his family has claimed the invention ever since.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

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