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. …
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.
Ran out of chili crisp? The closest stand-ins are the condiments built the same way. Here’s what to reach for, what to skip, and how to fake it from your pantry.
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 …
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 aji limo is a hard chili to replace, because you’re really replacing two things at once: a solid medium heat (30,000 to 50,000 Scoville heat units) and a very specific bright, citrusy, floral aroma. Reach for the wrong stand-in and you can match the …
The California chile — the dried, ripened form of the Anaheim — is one of the gentlest dried chilies in the Mexican pantry, and that mildness is exactly why it’s worth choosing a substitute carefully. Its job in a dish is rarely heat; it’s the …
The Anaheim pepper is one of the mildest true chilies you can cook with, and that mildness is exactly why it’s worth choosing a substitute carefully. Reach for the wrong one and you can lose the crisp, faintly sweet character that makes the Anaheim so …
Jalapeño peppers are everywhere, so you’ll rarely be stuck without one. That makes “what’s a good jalapeño substitute?” less a rescue mission than a choice: do you want the same bright, grassy flavor with a different level of heat, do you just need fire, or …
Do you have a recipe that calls for Old Bay seasoning and none in the house? Or maybe you enjoy seafood and fries, but Old Bay’s distinctive flavor just is not your thing. Either way, there are several effective substitutes depending on how closely you …
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