💡 Facts

How to prepare whole dried chillies such as ancho, guajillo and chipotle: cleaning, toasting without burning, soaking times, what to do with the soaking liquid, and blending to a smooth paste.

Chilli-eating contests test who can eat the hottest chillies fastest or longest, from festival stages to online challenges. They are popular, mostly harmless, and occasionally dangerous.

Persian cooking favours fragrance over heat: saffron, dried lime, rose petal, cinnamon and turmeric, huge quantities of fresh herbs, and slow stews balancing sour and sweet.

Sichuan cooking is famous for mala, the numbing heat of Sichuan pepper and chilli, but its cooks describe more than twenty compound flavours, many of them not hot at all.

Chiltepín and pequín are tiny, very hot Capsicum annuum chillies, close to the wild ancestor of the species. Chiltepín is round and often wild-harvested; pequín is slightly larger and oval.

Read about Chiltepín and pequín →

Chinese cooking seasons mainly with ginger, garlic, spring onion and fermented sauces, reserving dried spices for braises and roasts, with vast differences between regions.

A turmeric-yellow blend of coriander, cumin, fenugreek, chilli and other spices, created for British and colonial kitchens and now at home in Japan, the Caribbean and beyond.

Read about Curry powder →

The Spice Finder matches what you are cooking and the spices you actually have against the site's blends, rubs, pastes and herb sauces, and ranks what you can make now first.