Red Pepper Flakes Capsicum annuum
Bloom them in oil at the start and the heat runs through the whole dish. Thrown in at the end they sit in hot spots.
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
Bloom in oil at the start
Capsaicin is fat-soluble, so flakes dropped into warm oil at the beginning spread heat evenly through the whole dish. Sprinkled on at the end you get hot spots and cold spots instead of seasoning.
Warm oil, not hot
They scorch fast and burnt chili is acrid and unmistakable. Into oil over medium heat for thirty seconds until it colours and smells, then the garlic, then everything else.
Taste the jar
Because heat varies so much between batches, a recipe quantity is a starting suggestion. Crush a flake between your fingers and touch it to your tongue before you measure out a tablespoon.
Beyond the kitchen
PIZZA SHAKERS
The jar of red pepper flakes on a pizzeria table is an American-Italian institution with no real equivalent in Italy, where peperoncino tends to be cooked into the dish rather than offered as a condiment.
GOCHUGARU AND KIMCHI
Korean gochugaru is sun-dried rather than machine-dried, which preserves its colour and fruit, and is essential to kimchi and gochujang. Substituting standard flakes makes kimchi both too hot and the wrong colour.
ALEPPO PEPPER
Aleppo pepper, or pul biber, is crushed with salt and oil rather than dried plain, giving it a moist, dark texture. Syrian production was disrupted by war, and much of what is sold under the name now comes from Turkey.
BIRDS DO NOT TASTE IT
Capsaicin binds to a receptor birds lack, so they eat chilies freely and disperse the seeds intact. This is generally understood as the evolutionary point of the compound: deter mammals, whose molars destroy seeds, and recruit birds, whose guts do not.
A longer history
Chilies were domesticated independently in several parts of the Americas, with the earliest firm evidence from Mexico around six thousand years ago. They reached Europe with Columbus's returning ships and moved along Portuguese and Spanish routes into Africa, India and East Asia within a few decades — one of the fastest and most complete culinary transformations on record.
Drying and crushing was the obvious preservation method wherever chilies landed, and each region developed its own version according to the pepper available and the drying conditions. Korea's gochugaru, Calabria's peperoncino, the Levant's Aleppo pepper and Turkey's pul biber are all the same basic idea executed on different fruit with different results.
The generic American supermarket jar is the outlier: a commodity blend, usually cayenne-based, standardised for heat rather than flavour. It became a fixture on pizzeria tables in the United States in the twentieth century and is now what most English-speaking cooks picture when a recipe says chili flakes.