Dried red chillies

What a dried chilli is

A dried red chilli is the ripe fruit of a Capsicum plant, left to lose its water until it is hard, brittle or leathery, and kept for months or longer. Most of the chillies sold this way belong to Capsicum annuum, the species domesticated in Mexico, though other species are dried too. The red colour comes from carotenoids, chiefly capsanthin and capsorubin, which are described as unique, powerful and highly stable; the pigment profile and concentrations change as the fruit matures.

Dried chillies keep through the winter in temperate climates, and in hot countries chillies are often dried on the ground in the sun. At home they can be threaded on cotton and hung in a warm, dry place. The dried pods are used whole, torn into flakes, ground to powder, smoke-dried to make chipotle, or steeped into chilli oil. Worldwide, about 5.5 million tonnes of dried chillies were produced in 2024, led by China, Thailand and Bangladesh with more than 300,000 tonnes each, against roughly 45 million tonnes of fresh green chillies.

One pod, two names

In Mexico the fresh and dried forms of a chilli often have different names, and the dried name is the one cooks use in sauces. The fresh poblano becomes the ancho when dried, a name meaning wide: a broad, flat, heart-shaped pod that starts dark purplish green and ripens to a red so dark it is nearly black, rated at about 1,000 to 1,500 Scoville heat units, and often ground to powder. A related, darker, sweeter and softer variety is the mulato. The pasilla is sometimes wrongly called a poblano, especially in the United States, but it is a distinct pepper. The fresh mirasol becomes the guajillo, the second most common dried chilli in Mexican cooking: thin-skinned, shiny and reddish-brown, around 8 to 10 centimetres long, generally sweet and somewhat fruity, and mild to medium in heat, with sources giving figures from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units and a wider range of about 2,000 to 15,000. Its smaller, hotter relative is the guajillo puya, and Zacatecas is named as a main producer.

The same logic applies elsewhere. Cayenne and paprika are dried and ground annuum pods. Paprika is traditionally made from the Longum group, with milder grades made mostly of flesh with the seeds removed and hotter ones keeping some seeds, stalks and calyces. Spanish pimentón de la Vera is smoked over oak and holds a Denomination of Origin, covering about 1,500 hectares and some 4.5 million kilograms a year, while pimentón de Murcia is unsmoked and dried in sun or kilns. Hungarian paprika is graded from the delicate különleges through édesnemes, félédes and rózsa to the hot erős. In Korea gochugaru is made from sun-dried red peppers known as taeyangcho; it ranges from fine powder to flakes and is described as spicy, sweet and slightly smoky. Kashmiri chilli powder is bright red but mild.

A confusing coincidence deserves a mention. The Peruvian ají mirasol is a dried ají amarillo, a Capsicum baccatum, while the Mexican mirasol that becomes the guajillo is a Capsicum annuum. The shared word mirasol, meaning looking at the sun, describes the way both are dried and not a shared plant.

From Mexico to every kitchen

Capsicum annuum was domesticated in Mesoamerica about 6,000 years ago by selective breeding of wild peppers, and remains of wild chillies from caves and sites such as the Oaxaca Valley suggest they were eaten more than 8,000 years ago. Diego Álvarez Chanca sailed with Columbus on his second voyage in 1493 and published his observations on the plant's medicinal uses in 1494. By the middle of the sixteenth century chillies were common in Spanish gardens, they appeared in Italy by 1526 and Germany by 1543, and they reached the Balkans by 1569, where they became paprika. Portuguese traders carried them to Africa and Arabia and then to Goa, Sri Lanka and Malacca; the Spanish took them to the Philippines; and the earliest Chinese record dates from 1591. The Maya and Aztecs also used the plant in traditional medicine.

Hungary shows how an imported chilli became a national spice. The Ottoman Empire ruled central Hungary for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and industrial paprika production began near the end of the seventeenth and was well developed by the eighteenth. The earliest Hungarian dictionary entry, from 1604, calls the spice Török-bors, Turkish pepper, and the name paprika entered Hungarian use in 1775. Central European paprika stayed hot until the 1920s, when a breeder in Szeged found a sweet-fruited plant. In Tunisia, chillies came through the Columbian exchange, presumably during the Spanish occupation of Hafsid Tunisia from 1535 to 1574, and became the basis of harissa.

What drying does to a chilli

Drying removes water and concentrates flavour and colour. The way the pods are dried matters: for paprika, the drying method, the cultivar and the length of storage all affect the final colour, and sun-drying can take up to 10 days in good conditions. The carotenoids that give the colour, capsanthin and capsorubin, are described as highly stable, which is why a well-dried red pod keeps its colour. Smoke is a drying route of its own: the chipotle is a smoke-dried ripe jalapeño, and Spanish pimentón de la Vera is smoked over oak.

A dried chilli is still a raw agricultural product, and moulds are its main hazard. Chillies are among the staple commodities regularly contaminated with aflatoxins, the toxins of certain moulds, along with maize, peanuts, rice and wheat, and spices in general are affected. Moulds can invade crops before harvest or in storage, and prolonged high humidity and stresses such as drought raise the risk. Conditions that favour aflatoxin production include a moisture content of at least 7 percent and temperatures between 13 and 40 degrees Celsius, with an optimum of 27 to 30. Chronic exposure is linked to liver and gallbladder cancer, and United States regulators set action levels of 20 to 300 parts per billion depending on the food. The control the literature names is a clean supply chain: rejecting mouldy material and testing batches before use.

Dried chillies are also a known target for adulteration: published work includes methods for detecting illegal dyes in chilli products, and brick powder is a recorded adulterant of Kashmiri chilli powder.

Rehydrating and pasting

A dried chilli is usually put back into water before it becomes a sauce. For guajillo the pods are seeded, soaked or simmered, then pulverised, mashed or pureed into a paste, which is cooked with other ingredients to make a sauce; the same treatment underlies salsas, marinades, adobo pastes, butters and spice rubs, as in mole, carne adobada, pambazos and consomés. Removing the seeds and the pale placenta lowers the heat.

Gochugaru goes straight into the seasoning. Korean kimchi is salted first and then dressed with a paste that carries the chilli flakes; the measured Oregon State University Extension kimchi, which uses half a cup of dried Korean chilli flakes for about two pounds of napa cabbage, is one example. The chilli does not drive the fermentation, which is the work of the lactic acid bacteria on the cabbage; it supplies colour, heat and flavour to the brine. Chillies reached Korea in the early seventeenth century, with the first mention in the 1614 encyclopaedia Jibong yuseol, but early kimchi had no chilli at all and its use did not become widespread until the nineteenth century.

Where dried chillies go

Dried chillies colour and season a long list of dishes. Oaxacan black mole uses them, and Mexican cooks make adobo pastes, marinades and salsas from guajillo and ancho. Paprika is essential to chorizo in Spain and Portugal, where it is called colorau, and appears in paella and sofrito; in Hungary it is central to gulyás, pörkölt and paprikás and is often a table condiment; in France it flavours the sauce hongroise and the rouille served with bouillabaisse; in Germany and Austria it goes into goulash; and in Morocco and the Middle East it appears in bissara, chermoula and baharat and as a garnish for hummus and baba ghanoush. Italy uses little of it, though it appears in Liptauer in Friuli and in ventricina in Molise.

In India, Kashmiri chilli powder goes into tandoori chicken, tiger prawns, pickles, chutneys, pav bhaji and misal pav, mainly for colour, and in Korea gochugaru seasons kimchi and other dishes. Chilli oil is the other everyday route: dried pods steeped in oil carry heat and colour into noodle, dumpling and rice dishes.

Harissa and the dried-pepper pastes

Tunisian harissa is the classic preserve built on dried chillies, and its method is set out on the linked recipe pages. What matters here is what the chilli contributes. Harissa is traditionally made from sun-dried peppers that are split, destemmed and deseeded, washed and ground with salt, garlic and coriander, and kept in glass or pottery vessels; it is usually prepared by women in a convivial family or neighbourhood setting, and the practice was inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2022. The name comes from the Arabic root harasa, to pound or break into pieces. Tunisian harissa is often made with Baklouti peppers and chillies grown around Nabeul and Gabès, which are relatively mild at 4,000 to 5,000 Scoville units, so the character of the paste comes from the quantity and the drying as much as from the pod.

Chillies reached Tunisia through the Columbian exchange, presumably during the Spanish occupation of Hafsid Tunisia from 1535 to 1574. The paste has relatives across the region: hrous is a Maghrebi paste made with green peppers, and filfel chuma is a Libyan Jewish sauce of powdered sweet and hot peppers and crushed garlic.

Dried chillies in fermented foods

In a ferment the dried chilli is a seasoning and a colour, not the thing being fermented. Kimchi takes gochugaru into a brine of fermenting cabbage, and some Tunisian harissa variations include fermented onions or lemon juice. Fresh red chilli mash can ferment on its own, and hot-sauce makers use it that way, but that is a different material from a dried pod.

What the dried pod adds to such foods is chemical: capsaicinoids for heat and carotenoids for the red colour. Salt level, acidity and storage temperature, set by tested procedures, are what control the safety of a chilli ferment.

Choosing and keeping them

The labels that matter are the type, the cultivar and the heat, because dried chillies sold under one word can range from the almost mild ancho to a hot cayenne. Heat can be unpredictable even among pods from the same plant, as with the poblano, so tasting a small piece is better than trusting the name. Pods should be dry, free of mould and kept dry.

The heat is the main hazard: capsaicinoids bind to pain receptors in the mouth and throat.

Open questions

Heat ranges for dried types such as the guajillo differ between references, and drying temperatures and times for chillies are not standardised. The exact form of household harissa varies from family to family.