Massa de pimentão vs Biber salçası
The short answer
Two pastes of ripe red pepper and salt, kept differently. The Turkish paste is reduced, by days in the sun or by boiling, until it is thick and dark, and it is cooked and kneaded into food by the spoonful. The Portuguese paste is not reduced: the pepper is cured in coarse salt and ground, so it is far saltier, and it is rubbed on pork and worked into sausage meat ahead of cooking.
Side by side
| Massa de pimentão | Biber salçası | |
|---|---|---|
| Defining ingredients | Ripe red sweet pepper, fresh, Coarse salt | Ripe red pepper, fresh, salt |
| Origin | The Alentejo, the region to which Portugal’s inventory of traditional products assigns it. The inventory says households made it to season the meat of the yearly pig-killing and calls the practice centuries old, on the word of a producer whose family had made it for three generations. No dated source was read. | Southern and south-eastern Türkiye. The two registered pastes are those of Gaziantep and Hatay provinces, and a study from Osmaniye says making pepper into paste is especially common in the south of the country. None of the sources read says when it began; the registrations say only that it has a long past. |
| Cuisines | — | Turkish |
| Heat | None. It is made from sweet peppers, which the Alentejo calls garden peppers to tell them from the hot ones. | Sweet or hot, as made. The kapya pepper of the Hatay paste is a sweet one; hot pepper is added for a hot paste. |
| Flavour | Salted ripe red pepper. The sources read describe its colour, a red paste, and credit it with part of the taste of the region’s sausages; none describes the taste of the paste itself, and no tasting panel was found. | Concentrated ripe red pepper, salted. The Hatay registration describes its own paste as having a strong pepper smell from the sun-drying, a thick body and a dark colour, and says it no longer tastes like the fresh fruit. No tasting panel has described the paste itself. |
| Aroma | Not established | Not established |
Which should you buy?
Massa de pimentão
The sources read describe two things under the name. The inventory describes a paste made by a family producer: strips of pepper cured in layers of coarse salt in an earthenware vessel, drained, washed, ground with their skins and bottled under olive oil. It says this differs from industrial pastes in two ways, that the skin stays in and that the pepper is not fermented. The paste a food-science paper sampled in two sausage factories was acid, at pH 3.4 to 3.9, and the authors connect the yeasts they counted in one factory’s paste with a fermentation of the pepper. Neither source gives a recipe with amounts.
Biber salçası
Two things vary: how the water is taken out, and whether the paste is hot. In Hatay the cut peppers are dried in the sun for two to three days before they are minced, and the registration credits that drying with the paste’s dark colour and strong smell. In Gaziantep the peppers are crushed to a pulp and reduced under vacuum in a factory, and nothing is dried in the sun. The Hatay paste is thicker and saltier on its own figures. Hot pepper may be worked into the sweet. In Şanlıurfa, where the paste is made from the local isot pepper, a study describes a third way: at home the peppers are washed, cut up and minced first, and the mince is then left in the sun until it is thick enough, where the Hatay method dries the strips before mincing. The study says the paste ferments as it stands and credits that with a better smell and look; it reports this from an earlier work and did not measure it. A survey of households in one district of Osmaniye found that most made their own to suit their own taste, and it records no recipe.
Full detail on massa de pimentão and biber salçası, including evidence grades and sources for every claim above.