Matt Bray 
Chipotle powder answers a question that comes up constantly in home cooking: how do you get real smoke into a dish that never goes near a fire? It is ground chipotle pepper, which is a jalapeño left on the plant until it turns red and …
Scotch bonnets are hard to find on purpose-built trips and nearly impossible on accidental ones. Outside the sub-tropics and neighborhoods with a strong Caribbean population, most supermarkets simply don’t carry them. So you find the jerk recipe, you read the ingredient list, and you’re stuck. …
The scotch bonnet is the Caribbean’s signature chili: a squat, wrinkled, extra-hot pod that carries as much sweetness as it does fire. It’s the pepper behind jerk seasoning, behind most of the island hot sauces worth buying, and behind a heat that arrives a beat …
Hoisin on its own is already a fine glaze for grilled pork or chicken, but it isn’t barbecue sauce. Add ketchup, soy sauce, and rice wine vinegar and it becomes one: sweeter and deeper than a standard tomato sauce, with a savory backbone you don’t …
Blueberries and jalapeño sound like a mistake until you taste them together. The berries bring a dark, mellow sweetness, the pepper brings a bright green snap, and the gap between the two is the whole point of the salsa. It takes fifteen minutes, there’s no …
Everyone reaches for the margarita, and the paloma is the drink they’re missing. It’s grapefruit and tequila with a squeeze of lime, it’s genuinely more popular than the margarita in Mexico, and it takes about two minutes to build. A shot of jalapeño simple syrup …
Here’s a light summer salad with a real kick to it. Sweet mango and creamy avocado go over fresh greens, a blended habanero dressing goes over the top, and the whole thing comes together in about fifteen minutes. Serve it as an appetizer or a …
Let me run through some of what launched in the past year or so. Hershey put out Jolly Rancher Heat Wave gummies in January, coated in what the company calls a “chili inspired finish.” Health-Ade released a strawberry mango chili kombucha. Dairy Queen built an …
If you eat a lot of chili peppers, your feed probably served you something alarming a couple of weeks ago (July 2026 in this case, but, as you’ll see…these dates are not alone.) “Eating chili peppers may raise the risk of one deadly cancer.” (Science …
Hot sauce is the wrong bottle. Chamoy is fruit, salt, sour and chili all at once, and the swaps that work are the ones already doing three of the four. Here’s what to reach for, and how much to use.
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