Chilli powder

• lal mirch powderलाल मिर्च

  Hindi

  Lal mirch is red chilli. Indian recipes calling for chilli powder mean ground chilli alone, never the American blend that also contains cumin and oregano.

• chile en polvo

  Spanish

Pungent first, with a dry fruity sweetness behind it and a mild bitterness from the seeds. The dominant sensation is heat rather than flavour, which is exactly what distinguishes it from paprika at one end and from the American blend at the other.

Modest and fruity-dry, with a faint sweetness. Chilli powder is not a strongly aromatic spice — its contribution is pungency and colour, and a powder that smells of very little may still be perfectly hot.

Bright to deep red, varying with variety and freshness. Kashmiri-type powders are notably deeper red at much lower pungency; a dull brown-red powder is old, badly dried or heavily bulked.

A fine to medium powder. Coarser products such as gochugaru and pul biber are flakes rather than powder and disperse differently in a dish.

• Capsaicin — The dominant pungent principle, concentrated in the placental tissue rather than the seeds — the seeds are hot mainly by contact.
• Dihydrocapsaicin — The second major capsaicinoid, with a similar effect.
• Capsanthin — The principal red carotenoid, fat-soluble and responsible for the colour that disperses through oil.

Add half of what the recipe says, taste, then add the rest. This is not timidity — the pungency of a jar labelled "chilli powder" is genuinely unknown without tasting it, and the error is not recoverable once made, because capsaicin does not cook off. Bloom it in fat rather than stirring it into water, and add it off direct heat or into liquid so it does not scorch. If a dish does go too far, fat, dairy, sugar or acid will balance it; more simmering will not.

The world's default source of culinary heat. Ground chilli appears across Indian, Southeast Asian, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, North African and Caribbean cooking, bloomed in fat at the start of a dish, stirred into marinades and pastes, or dusted over food at the table. Its two contributions are pungency and red colour, and skilled use generally separates them — a mild colouring chilli for the look of a dish and a hotter one for its heat. It works with everything fatty or sweet enough to carry it: pork, chicken, beans, tomato, coconut, chocolate and dairy.

• blooming — Capsaicinoids and the red carotenoids are both fat-soluble, so chilli powder stirred into hot fat distributes evenly and colours the whole dish. Stirred into water it sits on the surface and tastes harsher.
• frying — Scorches quickly and turns acrid and bitter. Add it off the heat or into liquid, exactly as with paprika — the sugars and carotenoids that burn are the same ones.
• boiling — Pungency is heat-stable and does not cook off. A dish that is too hot cannot be simmered back to mildness; it can only be diluted or balanced with fat, dairy or sugar.

Judge by colour rather than smell. Good chilli powder is vividly red; a dull brown-red powder has aged or was poorly dried. Do not use heat as a freshness test — pungency survives long after colour and aroma have gone, so a jar can be simultaneously stale and painfully hot.

• Colour faded from bright red towards brown
• Hard caking that will not break up
• A flat, dusty smell
• Heat with no fruitiness behind it

• Photo-oxidation of carotenoids, which costs the red colour first
• Loss of the modest volatile aroma fraction
• Moisture uptake and caking
• Capsaicin is comparatively stable and outlasts all of the above

Buy whole where you can be bothered. Whole dried chillies let you see what variety you have, keep their colour longer, and can be toasted before grinding — which chilli powder cannot be. The stronger recommendation, though, is to buy named rather than generic: a jar of "chilli powder" is an unknown quantity of heat, and a jar of Kashmiri or ancho or gochugaru is a known one. Naming matters more than form here.

• A vivid red colour rather than a dull brown-red.
• A stated variety or origin — Kashmiri, Guntur, ancho, gochugaru — rather than the bare words "chilli powder".
• Any statement of heat level at all, which is rarer than it should be.
• A supplier subject to real contaminant testing, given the colourant history.
• Whole dried chillies as an alternative, which can be toasted and ground and whose variety is at least visible.

The trade grades chilli on measured colour and measured pungency. Almost none of that reaches the consumer: a domestic jar typically states neither variety nor Scoville range, so two jars both labelled "chilli powder" can differ in heat by a factor of fifty. Buying a named varietal powder is the only reliable way to know what you are getting.

Solanaceae

A ground product rather than a plant in its own right: chilli powder is whatever chilli variety the producer dried and milled, and different varieties differ in pungency by more than two orders of magnitude.

The Americas, where Capsicum was domesticated. Chillies spread worldwide following the Columbian exchange from the late fifteenth century and were absorbed into Asian and African cooking with remarkable speed.

• India (Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka) — major producer. The largest producer and exporter of dried chilli by a wide margin, with Guntur a reference market.
• China — major producer
• Mexico — origin
• Spain — notable producer
• Peru — notable producer

Fruits are picked ripe and red, since colour is a commercial criterion alongside pungency. Multiple pickings from the same plants are normal.

1. Picking — Ripe red fruits are picked, often over several passes.
2. Drying — Sun-dried on mats or floors, or mechanically dried where the climate makes sun drying unreliable.Why: Reduces moisture for storage. Slow or interrupted drying costs colour and risks mould.
3. Destemming and sorting — Stalks are removed and damaged or discoloured fruit sorted out.
4. Milling — Dried fruit is milled, with seeds and placental tissue usually included.Why: The placenta carries most of the capsaicin, so whether it is included is the main lever on the pungency of the finished powder.
5. Blending to specification — Commercial powders are blended across lots to hit a target colour and pungency.Why: Consistency between batches, which is the reason a brand tastes the same twice even though its raw material does not.

Traded on colour value and on pungency, both of which are measured instrumentally — colour by extractable colour units and pungency by capsaicinoid content converted to Scoville equivalents. The problem for a domestic buyer is that neither figure normally reaches the label, so a jar marked "chilli powder" carries no usable indication of how hot it is.

Chilli powder has a documented history of colour adulteration, most seriously with Sudan dyes, which are industrial colourants and not permitted in food; these prompted large international recalls in the mid-2000s and remain a monitored contaminant. Bulking with brick dust, starch and spent material has also been recorded, and ground spice is the easy vehicle for all of it.

Grown as an annual from transplanted seedlings. Pungency varies with variety first and growing conditions second — water stress raises capsaicin measurably, so the same variety is not equally hot from year to year.

Warm growing season with a reliable dry period for drying. Rain during the drying window is the main quality risk and causes both mould and colour loss.

Chillies were domesticated in the Americas and were unknown to the rest of the world before the late fifteenth century. Their spread afterwards was extraordinarily fast: within roughly a century they were established across South and Southeast Asia, China and Africa, and had been absorbed so completely into those cuisines that they are now widely assumed to be native to them.

Chilli inverted the economics of the spice trade. Where pepper was scarce, distant and monopolisable, chilli grew readily almost anywhere warm and could be raised by the people who wanted it. It became the cheap heat that displaced pepper in much of the world, and India — which had no chillies at all before the sixteenth century — is now the largest producer and exporter of dried chilli in the world.