Matt Bray 
If you grow banana peppers, you already know the problem: the plant doesn’t hand you two or three at a time, it hands you thirty. And if you buy them, you’ve probably defaulted to the same move every time, which is slicing a few rings …
You love them on your deli sandwiches, so why not have them ready and waiting at home? This pickled banana pepper recipe is easy and surprisingly quick, largely because it is built for immediate eating rather than canning. The brine comes together in a single …
Chili crisp and chili oil sit side by side on the same shelf, look related through the glass, and get used almost interchangeably in English. They aren’t the same thing. The short version is that chili oil is a flavored oil and chili crisp is …
Chili crisp is a Chinese chili oil loaded with crunchy solids: fried garlic, shallots, chili flakes, and often fermented soybeans, all suspended in a savory, spicy oil. It’s the condiment spice lovers reach for to lift eggs, noodles, dumplings, and just about anything else. Here’s …
A jar of chili crisp earns its spot in the fridge fast. It’s the condiment that makes you rethink what a spoonful of oil can do: crunchy fried garlic and shallots, a slow numbing tingle from Sichuan peppercorn, deep savory chili heat, and just enough …
The Hungarian wax pepper brings a specific combination to a dish: a solid medium heat, 5,000 to 10,000 Scoville heat units (SHU), wrapped in a bright, sweet-tangy, almost pickle-ready flavor. Using PepperScale’s flavor families, it’s Green & Grassy chili with an unusually vivid tang, most …
The Hungarian wax pepper is the chili that fools people. It’s glossy, yellow, and waxy-skinned, so it gets grabbed off the shelf as a mild banana pepper more often than almost any other pepper. Then it bites back. Behind that friendly color sits a genuine …
The poblano and the serrano are both cornerstones of Mexican cooking, but they sit at opposite ends of the mild-to-medium range and get used in almost opposite ways: one a big, mild pepper made for stuffing and roasting, the other a small, punchy chili made …
The cayenne and the serrano are both familiar medium-hot chilies, but most cooks meet them in completely different forms: the cayenne almost always as a dried powder on the spice rack, the serrano almost always as a fresh green pod in the produce aisle. Both …
The serrano and the jalapeño are the two great fresh green chilies of Mexican cooking, so alike in flavor that they’re often used interchangeably. Both are Capsicum annuum, both are picked and eaten green well before they’d ever ripen to red, and both belong to …
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