Ingredients · Spice

Red Chile Flakes

Capsicum spp. · Solanaceae (nightshade family)

Red Chile Flakes
Crushed red pepper — the shaker on a pizzeria table. Flakes are usually made from cayenne-type peppers somewhere in the 30,000 to 50,000 Scoville range, and they carry a high share of seed, which people often blame for the heat although the heat is actually in the white pith. Three products carry them. The flake form matters: it blooms in hot oil, which is what makes garlic-and-oil pasta work.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
TasteHeat first — sharp and quick, then warmth — with a little dried-fruit sweetness and a toastiness when bloomed in oil

How to use it

Bloomed in olive oil with garlic — the base of aglio e olio and arrabbiata. Shaken over pizza. In sausage, pickling blends and chile oil. Add early to oil, late to a finished dish. Crushed flakes lose their aromatics faster than whole chiles, so buy small.

With food

Olive oil and garlic. Tomato. Pasta and pizza. Broccoli and greens. Sausage. Anchovy. Honey. Clams.

With spices

Garlic and oregano. Basil. Fennel seed, in sausage. Black pepper. Paprika.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient.

Its story

Where it comes from

Chiles have been harvested in the Americas since around 7,500 BCE. China and Turkey are the leading producers of flakes today. Our lot names no origin and no heat figure.

What happened

A village outside Bitola in North Macedonia called Bukovo is credited with inventing chile flakes, and several languages take the spice's name from it — bukovec in Macedonian, bukovka in Serbo-Croatian and Slovene. Its growers tie their peppers into long wreaths, dry them in the sun and then in low ovens, and grind them in wooden mortars through the winter. The shaker on the table, though, may be a North American invention: a 1903 New York Tribune piece described Italian immigrants' pomidore pizza seasoned plentifully with powdered red pepper, and Lombardi's says the flakes have been there since the beginning — while in Naples today the old pizzerias put no jar on the table at all. Arrabbiata, meanwhile, literally means angry.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

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