Matt Bray 
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 …
Serrano peppers are one of the most useful chilies you can cook with, but they can still be surprisingly hard to track down. And when they’re missing, the right substitute matters. Reach for the wrong one and you can lose the crisp, bright, grassy character …
The serrano is the jalapeño’s hotter, brighter sibling — a small, thin-walled Mexican chili named after the sierras, the mountains of Puebla and Hidalgo where it originated, and a permanent fixture in Mexican kitchens for salsas, pico de gallo, and guacamole. At 10,000 to 23,000 …
Few chili names cause as much confusion as these two. The aji limo and the aji limón — better known as the lemon drop pepper — are both bright, citrusy Peruvian chilies with nearly identical “aji” names, and they’re routinely mistaken for each other. But …
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