Red chilli powder

What the name covers

Red chilli powder is the dried, ground fruit of one or more chilli varieties, and the name hides more than it tells. Pure ground chilli contains only the chilli fruit, while a blend mixes the chilli with other spices such as cumin, onion, garlic powder and sometimes salt, and a hot blend adds cayenne. Red chillies are the most common base. Heat is not consistent from one powder to the next, because it depends on the chillies in the bag and the recipe of the blend.

The word red points to ripe pods. A chilli left on the plant turns from green to red as chlorophyll gives way to carotenoids, mainly capsanthin and capsorubin, which are described as unique, powerful and highly stable. The pigment profile and concentration change with maturity, so the colour of a powder reflects when the chillies were picked as well as which variety they were. Red chilli powder is the product that carries the colour, and often the heat, of a pickle, chutney or paste.

A family of powders

Because any dried red chilli can be ground, the powder comes in many named types, and which one a recipe means is often left unsaid. The list of single-chilli powders includes Aleppo, ancho, cayenne, chipotle, chile de árbol, jalapeño, New Mexico, pasilla and piri piri. Gochugaru is the Korean version, made from sun-dried red peppers called taeyangcho; it runs from fine powder to flakes and is described as spicy, sweet and slightly smoky, and that made from Cheongyang chillies is finer and hotter. Ata gun powder is used in Yoruba cooking. The ancho, whose name means wide, is the dried poblano: a broad, flat, heart-shaped pod that ripens to a red so dark it is nearly black, and one that is often ground into powder; its close relative the mulato is darker, sweeter and softer. Paprika is a powder of dried red Capsicum annuum, traditionally of the Longum group; the milder kinds are mostly flesh with most seeds taken out, while hotter ones keep some seeds, stalks and calyces. Spanish pimentón is made from small round fruits of several annuum varieties, and the one called pimentón de la Vera is smoked over oak.

Cayenne deserves a note, because its powder is often not what the name says. The cayenne chilli is a Capsicum annuum, long and tapering, typically 10 to 25 centimetres, usually rated at about 30,000 to 50,000 Scoville units, though some rate 20,000 or less. Its name is thought to come from kyynha, the word for capsicum in Old Tupi, spoken in Brazil. The fruits are usually dried and ground, but cayenne powder is often a blend of other chilli types, frequently without cayenne in it, and may or may not include seeds. In North America cayenne is the main pepper in crushed red pepper.

Kashmiri chilli powder is the best-known colour powder of India. The pods are wrinkled and rough, often brownish when dried in the traditional way, and their pigment is densely concentrated. They add a deep red colour and flavour without making food overly pungent, and are rated mild, at 1,000 to 2,000 Scoville units, though market powders sold under the Kashmiri name have been tested at far higher figures, 48,000 and 60,000 units for two brands, so the name alone is no guarantee. Reported capsaicin content is 0.325 percent in one figure from India's Spices Board and 0.126 percent in some qualities in a 1999 study, and the American Spice Trade Association colour value is given as 54.10. The chillies are traditionally sun-dried for a long time and are harvested in winter, grown mainly in Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh and also in Goa, and India is the largest producer and consumer. Byadagi chillies are often used as a substitute because demand for the Kashmiri type is high. In Indian kitchens the powder goes into tandoori chicken, tiger prawns, pickles, chutneys, pav bhaji and misal pav, mainly for colour.

Comparing heat and colour

Heat is the property cooks most want to compare, and the Scoville scale is the usual yardstick. Scoville units originated with Wilbur Scoville in 1912, and since the 1980s heat has been measured by high-performance liquid chromatography. On that scale a bell pepper rates zero, a poblano dried as ancho about 1,000 to 1,500, a guajillo about 2,500 to 5,000, a Kashmiri type 1,000 to 2,000, a cayenne 30,000 to 50,000, and a piri piri or bird's eye 50,000 to 100,000. Those are ranges for the whole chilli, and a powder made from them inherits the range. Heat also depends on the growing season: water-stressed plants can produce hotter fruit, and in habanero the capsaicin concentration rises in some parts of the fruit under water shortage.

Colour is measured separately. The American Spice Trade Association colour value quoted for Kashmiri powder, 54.10, belongs to a mild powder, which shows that colour and heat are separate qualities: Kashmiri chilli is valued for a deep red that does not make food overly pungent. Hungarian paprika is graded from sweet to hot, from the delicate különleges through édesnemes, félédes and rózsa to the hot erős, and Spain sells pimentón as dulce, agridulce or picante. The pimentón de la Vera holds a Denomination of Origin covering about 1,500 hectares and some 4.5 million kilograms a year, and the unsmoked pimentón de Murcia is made from bola or ñora peppers dried in sun or kilns.

How the powder came to be

Powdered chilli depends on the spread of the chilli itself. Capsicum annuum was domesticated in Mesoamerica about 6,000 years ago, and Indigenous Americans cultivated the cayenne type for about 7,000 years before Columbus carried chillies to the rest of the world around 1493. They were common in Spanish gardens by the middle of the sixteenth century, appeared in Italy by 1526, Germany by 1543 and the Balkans by 1569, where they became paprika. Portuguese traders took them to Africa, Arabia, Goa, Sri Lanka and Malacca, and the earliest Chinese record dates from 1591.

The commercial chili powder of the United States has a documented origin. D. C. Pendery and William Gebhardt created the first American commercial blends for chili con carne. Gebhardt ran Miller's Saloon in New Braunfels, Texas, where fresh chillies were available only seasonally; he imported ancho peppers from Mexico, ground them three times in a small meat grinder, and produced the first commercial chili powder in 1894. Hungarian paprika has its own history: the earliest Hungarian dictionary entry, from 1604, calls it Török-bors, Turkish pepper, and the name paprika entered Hungarian use in 1775.

Making it, and what can go wrong

Powder is the end of a drying process. Paprika is commonly made by sun-drying that can take up to 10 days in good conditions, and the drying method, the cultivar and the length of storage all affect its final colour. Gebhardt's first commercial powder was made by grinding dried ancho peppers three times in a small meat grinder. The sources used here give no figures for how quickly ground chilli loses colour or flavour.

Two hazards belong to the product. The first is mould toxin. Chillies are among the staple commodities regularly contaminated with aflatoxins, along with maize, peanuts, rice and wheat, and spices in general are affected. Moulds can invade the crop before harvest or in storage, prolonged high humidity and drought stress raise the risk, and the conditions that favour aflatoxin production include a moisture content of at least 7 percent and temperatures between 13 and 40 degrees Celsius. Chronic exposure is linked to liver and gallbladder cancer. The practical defences named in the general literature are keeping crops from getting damp, rejecting mouldy material and testing batches of ingredients before use; the article that gives these facts is about the toxin in general and offers no chilli-specific limits or storage times. The second hazard is adulteration. Brick powder is a known adulterant of Kashmiri chilli powder, and published work includes methods for detecting illegal dyes in chilli products, so a powder's colour proves nothing about what is in it.

What it does in pickles and ferments

Red chilli powder is almost always added to a pickle for its colour, heat and aroma, not to start the fermentation. Its role is clearest in the salt-and-vinegar preserved limes of Sri Lanka called lunu dehi. In one published method, about ten yellow, ripe limes are stuffed with copious amounts of salt, dried in the sun until the skins turn light brown, and packed into a jar with a teaspoon each of chilli powder and kochchi miris (a chilli), crushed peppercorns, sugar and the sun-dried juice; vinegar is poured in to cover, and the sealed bottle is kept undisturbed in a cool, dry place. The page says the bottle can last up to five years and that older ones taste better, a claim about keeping quality that is a cook's statement, not a safety finding. Salt and vinegar, not the chilli, are what preserve the limes.

Gochugaru in kimchi plays the same part. In an Oregon State University Extension recipe, half a cup of dried Korean chilli flakes seasons about two pounds of napa cabbage after it has been salted for one to two hours; the kimchi then ferments at 20 to 22 degrees Celsius for 24 to 36 hours and for a week after that, reaches an optimal pH of 4.2 as lactic and acetic acids form, and carries a final salt concentration of 2 to 5 percent. The lactic acid bacteria on the vegetables do the fermenting; the chilli supplies colour, heat and flavour. The capsaicinoids that give the heat sit in vesicles on the placenta of the fruit, so the placenta carries the main store of heat in a ground pod; no source used here measures how heat or colour behave in a finished pickle.

Choosing and keeping it

The first question to ask of a jar is whether it is pure ground chilli or a blend, because a blend carries salt, cumin or garlic that change a recipe. The second is which chilli it is made from, since heat ranges from the mildness of a Kashmiri or paprika type to the sharpness of cayenne or piri piri. A third is whether it includes seeds and stalks, which make a powder hotter and coarser. Colour is not a reliable guide to quality, given what is known about adulteration.

The recipes on this site that call for red chilli powder, such as pickles from Himachal Pradesh and Sri Lankan preserved limes, do not say which chilli it is, so cooks should treat their quantities as written and judge heat by tasting. The sources consulted give no shelf life for ground chilli, so none is stated. No allergen is recorded for it. The heat is the main hazard: capsaicinoids bind to pain receptors in the mouth and throat.

Open questions

Several points remain open. The recipes that name red chilli powder do not identify the chilli, the blend or the heat grade. Published Scoville figures for Kashmiri powders disagree by a wide margin. And no measured data was found for pigment loss or microbial behaviour of ground chilli in pickles.