When the summer farmers' market stalls are exploding with fresh chiles in every size, shape, and color, that canister of red pepper flakes in your pantry suddenly starts to look, well, a little sad. At a loss for what to do with all those gorgeous peppers? These techniques and recipes tease out all the nuanced flavors fresh chiles offer. It's about to be 🔥.
All things being equal, we’ll readily admit that it’s fun to burn out on nuclear wings at the bar or to sweat over an incendiary bowl of mapo dofu once in a while. The key to cooking with chiles, however, is to think of their heat not as a dare but as another essential building block of flavor, right alongside salt, acid, and fat. Rather than overpowering a dish, a perfectly calibrated prickle of spice enhances the other elements and wakes up the palate.
There's so much hiding behind the fire—bright fruitiness, delicate floral notes, earthiness and funk—and prepping chiles in ways that tame their heat is the secret to unlocking their true potential. Once the peppers have been mellowed out, you can pack more of them into a dish. Here are three ways to do it:
Seed
The spongy white membrane with seeds attached is where most of the chile’s heat is concentrated. Slicing the peppers in half and scraping out those parts will calm down the intensity of the chile considerably.
Char
Cooking peppers briefly over a high flame can help take their edge off. Choose your preferred method: Char chiles whole on the grill, under the broiler, or directly on a stovetop gas burner and peel off the burnt layer before seeding them (if you end up with some black bits, don't sweat it).
Soak
Capsaicin (the compound that contributes to a chile’s heat) is alcohol soluble. For the hottest specimens, remove membranes and seeds, muddle chiles, and soak in vodka for anywhere from a few hours up to a couple of days.
Gone are the days when the lonely jalapeño was the only chile in the produce aisle. Now that any supermarket worth its salt stocks a decent array of peppers, and farmers’ market stalls are flush with all kinds of crazy varietals, buying them can get a little overwhelming. Relax: We got you. Here’s a handy guide to some of our favorites and how you can use them.
Chiles thrive under the scorching sun and start to peter out as summer wanes. But if you’re strategic, you can harness all of that flavor and spice so that it’s ready to be deployed in winter’s darkest hour. Here are four recipes to the season, from D.I.Y. dried chiles to green curry paste to a homemade hot sauce so good it’ll banish that bottle of Sriracha to the back of the pantry.
Spicy Confit Chiles
Jalapeño-Pickled Peppers
Green Curried Paste
Some chiles don’t need to be handled with care. Wrinkly little shishitos and Padróns are bright and grassy-tasting, with just the faintest tickle of spice (well, 90 percent of the time). Blistered on the grill or in a dry cast-iron pan, drizzled with good olive oil, and sprinkled with flaky sea salt, they make for summer’s most effortless cocktail snack. And when tossed with other ingredients, they lend a bit of their irresistibly green floral flavor to everything they touch.
The goal for this brisket recipe is to pack in as much chile flavor as possible. But if all you do is pile chile on chile on chile, you’ll find yourself on a bullet train to palate fatigue. That’s where the vinegar, salt, and—especially—the brown sugar come in. The sweetness rounds out the sharpness, which means that you can use more hot sauce, which, in turn, means more chile flavor. Everyone wins.
Sweet and Spicy Antipasto Salad
Pineapple-Chile Limeade
Chile, Tomato, and Charred Red Onion Salsa