Welcome to PepperScale! Whether you’re new to chili peppers or an old pro, you’ll find something here to enjoy. PepperScale was founded in 2013 as a resource to explore the nuances of hot peppers, both their heat and their flavors. Like grapes grown for wine, chili peppers have surprising flavor depth and each can bring something new to your cooking.
There’s a lot to take in here. We have over 1,500 articles, multiple ebooks, and 300+ videos: pepper profiles, recipes, hot sauce reviews, gardening guides, cooking tips, and more. Below you’ll find our recommended places to start based on your comfort level with our site and your potential interests.
The core of our approach: Our book, The Capsaicin Code
Everything on PepperScale — the pepper profiles, the recipes, the tool comparisons, the hot sauce reviews — is built on a single belief: that chili peppers deserve to be understood for their flavors, not just their heat. The Capsaicin Code is where that belief becomes a complete framework.
Think of it as the foundation layer for everything else you’ll find on this site. The book teaches you the three pairing principles that explain why certain flavors work with certain peppers, how to read a pepper’s character (not just its heat), and how to make decisions in the kitchen on purpose instead of by guesswork. Once you have that baseline, the 170+ pepper profiles on this site go deeper. The recipes make more sense. The tools become more intuitive. You stop asking “what pepper should I use?” and start knowing why.
Inside, you’ll find a full field guide to 30 essential peppers, 12 tested recipes that demonstrate the principles on a plate, and the science behind flavor pairing written for home cooks — not chemists.
Get The Capsaicin Code here →
For everyone new to PepperScale: Our master lists
We have two master lists that are the pillars of the site. We recommend to everyone to jump right into these lists as they are incredible resources for your chili pepper journey. Save them, come back to them often, and share them with your friends.
- Our hot pepper list. We’ve profiled over 170 chilies, giving detail on heat, flavor, appearance, uses, and more. Whether you’re new or old to hot peppers, you’ll likely find something new to explore here!
- Our hot sauce rankings list. We’ve reviewed 100+ different hot sauces, from popular brands to craft blends. We cover overall flavor, heat balance, usability, and collectibility in our hot sauce rankings. You can filter them, too, based on general heat and even the specific pepper used in the hot sauce.
For cooks: Our PepperScale tools
Chili peppers are a world of both heat and flavor, and cooking well with them means juggling a lot at once: how hot a pepper really is, what flavors it brings to a dish, what to do when you can’t find the one a recipe calls for, and how to recover when something turns out hotter than you planned. Our free, interactive tools take the guesswork out of those moments. Each one runs right in your browser and turns the depth behind PepperScale into quick, practical answers while you cook.
- The Chili Pepper Flavor Pairing Tool. Discover which ingredients and flavors bring out the best in a given chili. Built on the pairing science behind our book The Capsaicin Code, it’s the place to start when you’re building a dish around a pepper and want to know what belongs alongside it.
- The Dish Heat Calculator. A pepper’s Scoville rating tells you how fierce the chili is on its own, not how hot your finished dish will be. Tell the calculator which pepper you’re using, how much, and the size of the dish, and it estimates the heat of the food you’ll actually serve.
- The Pepper Substitute Finder. Out of the pepper a recipe calls for? This finds the best pepper-to-pepper stand-ins, ranked by how closely they match on heat and flavor and how easy they are to track down at the store.
- The Pepper Conversion Tool. Once you’ve settled on a stand-in, this works out how much of it to use to match the heat the recipe intended, with a second option that keeps the flavor right and dials in the heat using a clean booster like cayenne.
- The “Too Spicy” Rescue Tool. Made a dish hotter than you meant to? Tell it what you cooked and what’s in your kitchen, and it gives you ranked, practical fixes to bring the heat back down.
Bookmark this set and reach for it whenever a pepper question comes up mid-recipe. Like everything on PepperScale (outside of our books and products), the tools are free to use.
More for cooks: Our spicy recipes and recipe ebooks
You can find our spicy recipes in three ways.
- By our top navigation. The spicy recipes category shows you our recipes in published order. So if you want to see what’s been most recently added, go here to see what you’ve missed.
- By our advanced search (magnifying glass on the site). Our search does some amazing things. You can search by a chili pepper or any ingredient and find recipes that use them. You’ll see categories for popular search results, results by that specific ingredient, recipe videos, and other related resources. It’s an amazing resource for discovery.
- In ebook format. We package many of our recipes into purchasable thematic ebooks for those who prefer to use their e-reader/tablet while cooking in the kitchen. Each ebook comes zipped with a PDF and an EPUB version (sized to be Send to Kindle friendly.)
For hot sauce fans: Our reviews, videos, and giveaways
You can discover our hot sauce reviews in two ways.
- By our top navigation. Simply click on Reviews and you’ll see our most recent hot sauce reviews, listed in order of publishing. If you’re looking to see what you’ve missed recently, this is the place to go.
- By our advanced search (magnifying glass on the site). You can search for hot sauces right in our search and see, broken out, both our written reviews and any of our Sizzle Reel hot sauce review videos. Try search for the hot sauce name plus the word review. For instance, “Sriracha review” in the image below showcases three different sriracha brands, along with any video reviews we have on them.
- Our hot sauce rankings list. Of course, if you’re looking for a new hot sauce to try, our rankings provide a terrific place to start.
- Giveaways. From time to time we raffle off hot sauces (or sometimes other fiery products.) The best way to be alerted is to subscribe to PepperScale. We alert our newsletter readers about when these giveaways start and end. Or monitor our home page to see if there’s a recent contest published and live.
For chili pepper learning
You’ll find so many ways to learn through the links above, as we link internally to terrific resources throughout, but below are a few more tips to take your chili pepper learning to another level.
- Our hottest pepper in the world list. You can see the top 15 chilies by heat right here. It’s a good quick guide to the upper echelon of the pepper scale.
- Our PepperScale comparisons. We pair two different chilies, spices, or hot sauces in one post to really compare and contrast their similarities and differences. Simply search for a chili pepper with “vs.” in our search (click any magnifying glass on the site).
- Our substitute recommendations. Don’t have a specific pepper or fiery spice at hand, our substitute recommendations give you options. Use our search (click any magnifying glass): Type in the pepper or spice plus the word “substitute” and see what’s available. Note: These substitute pages often offer more unique non-pepper substitutes compared to our pepper substitute tool which focuses solely on pepper-to-pepper substitutes.
- Simply type a chili pepper name into our search. We have so many resources available. Searching by a pepper will show you our profiles, showdowns, substitutes, recipes (and where it’s used as an ingredient), and other article types.
For gardeners (beginners or vets)
We’re growing our gardening section quickly (pun intended!) Here’s how you can best find content.
- Our gardening section. Here you can see our gardening articles in order of publishing. Want to see what you may have recently missed or simply scan through our gardening posts, this is the best place to start.
- Planting guides. We do have planting guides on many popular chilies. You can find them via our search. Simply type in “planting guide” in our search to see what’s available.
- Our search functionality (magnifying glass on the site). For more advanced gardening topics, use our search to discover themes you are interested in.
Shopping PepperScale fiery spices
We do offer quite a few fiery spices and spice sets via our Etsy store. And subscribers receive 15% off (as long as you’re still subscribed.)