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 …
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 …
Crack open a jar of pepperoncini and there’s treasure in there beyond the peppers themselves. Pepperoncini juice is the brine the peppers are packed in, mostly vinegar, but infused along the way with salt, a whisper of the mild pepper’s own flavor, and usually a …
The California chile and the ancho are two of the mildest, most versatile dried chiles in the Mexican pantry, the gentle, sweet-earthy foundations under so many red sauces and moles. Both are dried peppers rather than fresh, both belong to our Nutty, Earthy & Dried …
The California chile and the guajillo are two of the workhorse dried red chiles of the Mexican kitchen — both mild, both prized for the color and body they lend to a sauce rather than for heat. They even share a flavor family: on our …
Somewhere along the way, a tidy little rule took hold: bell peppers come in male and female, and you can tell which is which by flipping one over and counting the bumps on the bottom. It spreads every year across social feeds and produce aisles, …
You won’t find two peppers on the Scoville scale more alike than the scotch bonnet and the habanero. They carry the same searing heat, they belong to the same flavor family, and side by side in a cooked dish most people can’t tell them apart. …
Two of the most familiar names in the chili world are the chipotle and the jalapeño, and the products built around them work hard to make them feel like opposites: one smoky and earthy, the other bright and crisp. Here’s the twist most people miss. …
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