What Is Hot chili peppers and How Can I Use It?

Green chili peppers are fresh chiles picked while still green, before they ripen to red. In the kitchen the name usually points to the mild-to-medium group: Anaheim, poblano, Hatch, and the long green Mexican chiles, plus the canned chopped green chiles sold in small cans for quick cooking.

Their flavor is grassy and bright with a vegetal edge, more like a hot green pepper than the deep, fruity heat of a ripe red chile. Heat ranges from gentle to noticeable depending on the variety, which is why most recipes name the chile or just say "to taste."

Reach for it when you want green flavor and warmth without scorching a dish.

Red chili peppers are simply chiles that have stayed on the plant until they ripen. Almost every chile turns red (or orange, or deep maroon) when fully mature.

That ripening changes the flavor. The grassy bite of the green stage gives way to something fruitier and rounder, even as the heat often climbs.

Used fresh, they bring color and a warm, mellow burn. Dried, they become the backbone of chili powders and the chile pastes behind countless cuisines.

A chipotle is a jalapeno that has been ripened to red, then smoked and dried. That double process turns a bright, grassy pepper into something deep and woody, with a slow medium heat most people can handle.

On the Scoville scale a chipotle lands around 2,500 to 8,000 units, the same range as the jalapeno it came from. The smoke is what makes it different, not the burn.

You will find chipotles two main ways. Canned in adobo, a tangy tomato and vinegar sauce, they are soft and ready to use. Sold dry, often labeled meco or morita, they need a soak in hot water first.

The habanero is a small, lantern-shaped chile that ripens from green to bright orange or red. It is one of the hottest peppers most home cooks will ever handle, and it carries a fruity, almost floral flavor underneath the fire.

On the Scoville scale a habanero runs from about 100,000 to 350,000 units, around 50 times hotter than a jalapeno. The heat arrives fast and lingers.

That fruitiness is the reason to bother. Behind the burn is a tropical, slightly citrusy sweetness that no milder pepper can fake. It is what makes habaneros central to Caribbean, Yucatecan, and West African cooking.

Banana peppers are long, tapered yellow peppers named for the obvious: the shape and the color look like a small banana. They run mild and lightly sweet, with a tangy edge that gets sharper once they are pickled.

Most people meet them as pickled rings. Those bright yellow slices get piled onto subs and pizza and tossed through salads. Fresh, they are crisp and grassy, closer to a sweet pepper than a hot one.

On the heat scale they barely register, roughly 0 to 500 Scoville units. That is far milder than a jalapeno, so they add flavor and crunch without setting anyone's mouth on fire.

The Thai bird's eye chili is a tiny chile, often barely an inch long, that delivers a sharp, immediate heat far out of proportion to its size. Thai cooks call it prik kee noo, and it is the default fresh chile across much of Southeast Asia.

Small as it is, this is not a beginner chile.

Heat lands in the 50,000 to 100,000 Scoville range, several times hotter than a serrano. The burn hits fast and bright, then fades, rather than building slowly the way a habanero does.

You will see them green or red on the same plant. Green ones are a touch grassier and sharper, red ones a little riper and fruitier, but both carry serious heat.

The scotch bonnet is a small, wrinkled chile that brings most of the heat to Caribbean cooking. It is named for its squat, lobed shape, which looks a little like a tam-o'-shanter cap, and it ripens from green through yellow to a deep orange-red.

The flavor underneath the burn is what separates it from a generic hot pepper. Behind the heat is a fruity, almost tropical sweetness, with notes that lean toward mango and apricot, which is why it belongs in jerk seasoning and island hot sauces rather than just any chili.

It is genuinely hot. On the Scoville scale it runs roughly 100,000 to 350,000 units, dozens of times hotter than a jalapeño, so a little goes a long way.

Sambal ulek is the most stripped-down of the Indonesian chili sambals: fresh red chilies ground to a coarse paste with salt, and little else.

No garlic, no shrimp paste, no sugar in the basic version, just clean, bright, blazing chili heat.

The name comes from the ulekan, the stone mortar and pestle used to crush the chilies. That coarse grind is part of its character, leaving you with a rough, seedy, vivid-red paste rather than a smooth sauce.

It is the building block sambal that gives a dish its heat without committing it to any other flavor, raw chili in spoonable form, which is why cooks across Indonesia and the Dutch-Indonesian kitchen reach for it constantly.

Pepperoncini are small, wrinkled peppers, light yellow-green, usually sold pickled in a tangy brine. They turn up in Italian and Greek cooking, where their job is brightness more than heat.

One bite is tart and a little sweet, with barely any warmth behind it.

On the Scoville scale they run about 100 to 500 units, milder than a jalapeno by a wide margin. That low heat is the whole point: pepperoncini add a vinegary pop without setting your mouth on fire.

Popular in Italian cooking, hot pickled cherry peppers are often found in the International aisle of the supermarket as opposed to the pickle aisle. Some jars feature a mixture of green and red peppers, which are equally as hot.

Don't confuse hot cherry peppers with roasted red peppers.

On the Scoville scale, which measures the level of capsaicin (the component that makes peppers spicy hot), cherry peppers can range from a warm 100 to a mouth-scorching 5000 units, which is about the same as a jalapeno pepper.

Typically, you would remove the seeds and inner membrane, which will significantly reduce the amount of spicyness.