Ají amarillo

• ají amarillo

  Spanish — Peru

  Literally "yellow chilli", and it ripens orange rather than yellow — the name describes the colour of the paste and the dried pod, not the fruit on the plant. Fresh, it is sold as ají escabeche in some Peruvian markets, which is the same chilli under a second name.

• ají mirasol

  Spanish — Peru

  The dried form has its own name — mirasol, "looking at the sun" — and a Peruvian recipe naming mirasol means the dried pod while one naming amarillo usually means the fresh chilli or the paste. English translations collapse the two.

• kellu uchu

  Quechua

Fruity and slightly sweet with a clean, forward heat that arrives quickly and does not build the way a chinense chilli does. Deveined and blanched, as it usually is, the fruit dominates and the heat becomes a background warmth — which is what allows Peruvian recipes to use it by the cupful.

Distinctly fruity — apricot and yellow raisin, with a faint floral edge — over a green vegetal base. It smells more like fruit than like chilli, which surprises people meeting it for the first time.

Bright orange fresh, deepening to a red-orange when dried. The paste is a vivid orange-yellow that colours a whole dish, which is a substantial part of why it is used.

Thick-fleshed fresh, leathery dried, and smooth as a paste. The flesh thickness is why it purées so well and why the paste is the dominant commercial form.

• Capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin — The heat, concentrated in the placental ribs rather than distributed through the flesh — which is what makes the deveining step so effective.(what capsaicin is)
• Capsicum carotenoids — The orange colour, and one of the two reasons the chilli is used in quantity. Fat-soluble and light-sensitive as in every capsicum.(what capsanthin is)
• Esters and terpenes — The apricot and floral character. Present in ripe fruit and absent from green pods, which is why ripeness matters more here than for chillies used for heat alone.

If you have fresh pods, split them, strip out the seeds and the pale ribs — that is where the capsaicin is — then blanch in two or three changes of boiling water before blending. Skipping that step is the single most common way a dish made outside Peru comes out inedibly hot, because the recipe quantities assume it. If you have the jar, that work is already done: fry a spoonful in oil until the colour bleeds out before anything else goes in the pan. Dried mirasol is soaked in hot water until pliable and blended with some of the soaking liquid.

A base rather than a seasoning. The paste is fried in oil to begin an enormous range of Peruvian dishes — ají de gallina, papa a la huancaína, causa, stews and rice dishes — where it supplies colour, body and a fruity warmth simultaneously. It is used by the tablespoon and the cupful rather than the pinch, which is only possible because the preparation has removed most of the heat. Dried mirasol is used where a darker, more concentrated character suits, and the fresh pod is used in salsas and ceviche within its growing range.

• boiling — Blanching in changed water is the standard Peruvian preparation and is a heat-management technique rather than a cooking one: it draws capsaicin out of the flesh while the carotenoids, which are not water-soluble, stay behind.
• frying — The blended paste is fried in oil at the start of a dish, in the step Peruvian cooking calls the aderezo. The carotenoids are fat-soluble and this is what colours the whole dish.
• grinding — Blended smooth rather than ground dry. The flesh is too thick and moist to powder usefully, which is why the paste rather than a powder is the commercial form.
• infusing — Dried mirasol pods are rehydrated in hot water and blended, exactly as Mexican dried chillies are, and the soaking liquid carries flavour worth keeping.

Bend a dried pod: it should be leathery and flex without snapping. A pod that cracks has dried out past usefulness and will not rehydrate into anything worth blending.

• Pods brittle rather than pliable
• Colour faded towards brown
• Any mould on the paste, which means discarding it

• Photo-degradation of the carotenoids, bleaching the orange the chilli is valued for
• Loss of the fruity ester fraction from dried pods
• Mould in the paste once opened, and in dried pods stored damp

Paste, unless you can get fresh pods. This is one of the few entries in the catalogue where a processed form is the right default rather than a compromise: the deveining and blanching that make the paste are a heat-management technique the recipes assume has already happened, and blending fresh pods without it gives a dish several times hotter than intended. Dried mirasol is the right choice where a deeper, raisiny character is wanted.

• For paste: chilli first on the ingredient list, and as few of water, starch and colouring as possible.
• A vivid orange rather than a dull yellow, in paste or pod.
• For mirasol: pods that flex rather than crack.
• Bought from a Latin American grocer, where it is an ordinary staple rather than a specialist import.

Solanaceae

A tall, sprawling plant, often taller than an annuum chilli, bearing long tapering fruit that hang downward and ripen from green through to a deep orange. The flowers carry yellow or brown spots on the corolla, which is the field mark that identifies C. baccatum and distinguishes it from every other domesticated Capsicum.

The Andes and adjacent lowlands of South America. Capsicum baccatum was domesticated in the region — Bolivia and Peru are both implicated in the archaeological and genetic record — and its cultivation remains overwhelmingly South American.

• PE — origin. Grown on the coast and in the valleys, and consumed domestically in very large quantity.
• BO — major producer
• EC — notable producer

Picked fully ripe and orange. Under-ripe green fruit is a different and much less useful ingredient here than it is for jalapeño, because the fruitiness that defines the chilli only arrives at full colour.

1. Ripe harvest — Fruit picked at full orange colour.Why: The apricot character is a property of the ripe fruit and is absent from green pods.
2. Sun drying, for mirasol — Whole pods dried in the sun until leathery and deep orange-red.Why: Concentrates the fruit sugars and produces the dried form Peruvian recipes name separately.
3. Deveining and blanching, for paste — Seeds and pale internal ribs removed, the flesh blanched in successive changes of water, then blended smooth.Why: The capsaicin is concentrated in the placental ribs, so removing them and blanching lowers the heat sharply while leaving the colour and fruit intact. This is why a Peruvian dish can contain a great deal of chilli and be only mildly hot.

The commercial risk is in the paste rather than the pod: jarred ají amarillo paste sold for export varies widely in how much chilli it actually contains, with water, oil, starch and colouring making up the difference. The pod itself is distinctive enough to be hard to substitute.

Grown as an annual in cultivation though perennial in its range, on a plant large enough to need support. Peruvian production is largely for the domestic market and for the paste trade.

Warm, with a long growing season. It tolerates a wider range of conditions than C. chinense and is grown from the Peruvian coast up into valleys at altitude.

Capsicum baccatum was domesticated in South America and, unlike the annuum, chinense and frutescens chillies that the Columbian Exchange carried around the world within a century, it stayed there. Ají has been central to Andean and coastal Peruvian cooking since long before contact, and the archaeological record for chilli use in the region is among the oldest anywhere. Its modern international presence dates largely to the last few decades, and to the export of Peruvian cooking rather than of the chilli.

Overwhelmingly domestic Peruvian consumption, with a growing export trade in jarred paste following the international spread of Peruvian restaurants. Fresh pods are rarely exported.