Bird's eye chilli

• prik kee nooพริกขี้หนู

  Thai

  Literally "mouse-dropping chilli", from the size. This is the pepper Thai recipes mean, and it is sold green and red at different heats and flavours rather than as one product.

• piri piri

  Swahili

  The African bird's eye, a related but distinct Capsicum frutescens pepper, and the origin of the Portuguese peri-peri sauces. Sold under the same English name and not the same chilli.

• cili padi

  Malay — Malaysia and Singapore

• ot hiem

  Vietnamese

• siling labuyo

  Tagalog — Philippines

Clean, direct heat arriving almost immediately, with a thin grassy note behind it. Red fruits are slightly sweeter and rounder than green. The heat is sharp rather than broad and it does not linger the way a superhot does.

Sharp and lightly grassy, much less pronounced than the heat and much less fruity than a habanero. There is not a great deal of aroma here — this is a chilli bought for pungency.

Bright green when unripe and vivid red when ripe, with a smooth, glossy, very thin skin. Both are sold and both are used.

Very thin-walled and crisp when fresh, drying to a brittle pod. It cannot be stuffed, roasted or peeled, and it is generally used whole, bruised or finely chopped.

• Capsaicin — The heat, and unusually concentrated relative to fruit size because a small thin-walled pepper is proportionally more placenta.
• Pyrazines — The modest green note in unripe fruit, largely gone once it ripens red.

Two or three pods, and taste before adding more. Bird's eye holds far more capsaicin per gram than a large chilli, because a small thin-walled fruit is proportionally more placental tissue, so substituting by count from a recipe written for a bigger pepper is how people get it wrong. Bruise a whole pod into a soup and remove it if you want a heat you can stop; slice or pound it if you do not, since pounding distributes the placental heat through the whole mixture and makes a paste much hotter than the same peppers sliced. Cutting out the pith reduces the heat substantially and removing only the seeds achieves very little. Freeze what you do not use — this is the one fresh chilli here that comes out of a freezer essentially unchanged.

Southeast Asian cooking above all: curry pastes, sambal, nam prik, stir-fries, soups, and sliced raw into fish sauce as a table condiment. Outside Asia it is met mostly as piri-piri sauce, with grilled chicken and prawns. It works with fish sauce, lime, garlic, lemongrass, coconut, prawns, chicken and pork, and its role is nearly always heat rather than flavour — the aroma is thin and the pungency is the reason it is there.

• grinding — Pounding into a paste distributes the placental heat completely and makes a dish much hotter than the same peppers sliced. This is the standard treatment in Thai and Malay cooking and the reason a nam prik is hotter than its pepper count suggests.
• infusing — A bruised whole pod in a broth or a sauce gives heat that can be stopped by removing it, which is the most controllable way to use a chilli this hot.
• frying — Capsaicin is fat-soluble, so frying disperses the heat evenly and makes it inescapable. Whole dried pods fried briefly in oil at the start of a dish is a standard technique and a committing one.

Press a fresh pod — it should be firm and glossy and spring back, with a green stem. For dried, the pod should bend slightly rather than shatter, and smell sharp rather than dusty.

• Fresh pods gone soft, wrinkled or brown at the stem.
• Translucent or brown patches, which are the start of rot.
• Dried pods that shatter to dust, or have faded from red to pale brown.
• Mould at the stem end, which spreads quickly through a bag.

There is no ground form in ordinary use, and the meaningful choice is fresh against dried. Buy fresh for Southeast Asian cooking, where the grassy sharpness and the raw use are the point, and freeze what you will not use within a fortnight — this chilli freezes better than any other fresh pepper in the dataset and can be sliced straight from the freezer. Dried pods are for frying whole into a hot oil at the start of a dish, which is a different technique and a different flavour, and they are not a preserved version of the fresh pod.

• Firm, glossy pods with green stems and no wrinkling or soft patches.
• Buy from a Southeast Asian grocer where possible, where the pepper sold as bird's eye is more likely to be the one recipes mean.
• Choose green or red deliberately — they are different in flavour, not merely in ripeness.
• Taste a sliver before committing a quantity. The name covers several peppers and bags genuinely vary.
• Buy more than you need and freeze the rest; they freeze better than any other fresh chilli here.

Sold as fresh produce with no grade stated, and graded commercially only for the dried and sauce trades, on capsaicin content. The variability a buyer actually faces comes from the name covering several peppers rather than from any grading failure.

Solanaceae

A bushy perennial in the tropics, grown as an annual elsewhere, bearing small pointed fruits of two to three centimetres borne upright on the plant. Fruits ripen from green through to red and are used at both stages.

The Americas, like every Capsicum, and specifically naturalised and developed in Southeast Asia and East Africa after the Columbian exchange. The peppers now called bird's eye are the product of four centuries of local selection rather than of American cultivation.

• TH — major producer
• VN — major producer
• MY — notable producer
• IN — major producer
• MZ — notable producer. Piri-piri, grown for the sauce trade.
• ZW — notable producer. African bird's eye for export.

Hand-picked over many passes, green or red according to the market. Green and red are used differently — green is sharper and more vegetal, red sweeter and slightly fruitier — and both are sold as bird's eye.

1. Picking — Continuous hand-picking at green or red ripeness depending on the intended use.Why: The two colours are different products rather than different grades.
2. Drying — Sun-dried whole for the dried trade, which is most of the African crop.Why: Shelf stability and export. Dried bird's eye is the basis of most commercial piri-piri products.
3. Sauce and paste manufacture — Fermented, blended with vinegar, garlic and oil into the sauces the pepper is best known for outside Asia.Why: Recorded because the sauce is how most people outside the growing regions meet this chilli.

No consumer grading standard. The fresh trade sorts on size and colour; the dried and export trade specifies capsaicin content for sauce manufacture, which is a laboratory figure rather than a retail grade.

Widely a garden and smallholding crop rather than a plantation one, picked continuously over a long season. Commercial production for the dried and sauce trades is concentrated in East and southern Africa and in Southeast Asia.

Tropical: warm, humid and frost-free, where the plant is a short-lived perennial cropping continuously. Grown as an annual in temperate climates, where it fruits far less freely.

A Columbian-exchange story with an unusually complete second act. Capsicum reached Asia and Africa through Portuguese trade in the sixteenth century and was adopted with extraordinary speed — within a century, chilli was so embedded in Indian, Thai and Sichuan cooking that it is now difficult to imagine those cuisines without it. The bird's eye chillies are the product of local selection over the four centuries since, in Southeast Asia and in East Africa independently, which is why the same English name covers genuinely different peppers.

Two modern trades: fresh pods within Asia, and dried pods and sauce from East and southern Africa to Europe. Piri-piri sauce is the commercially significant product and it carries a Portuguese colonial history that the pepper itself does not.

Chillies generally carry a long traditional-medicine record across the regions that adopted them. Recorded as tradition and context, not as a health claim, and SpiceHQ holds no source specific to this pepper.