Pepperitaville

HOW HOT IS THAT CHILI?

If you like to cook with chile peppers–and so many people do these days, given the popularity of such spicy cuisines as Mexican, Asian, and Caribbean–you’ve probably heard of the Scoville scale. Chile aficionados will brag that their favorite chiles are the hottest, with a scorching 300,000 on the Scoville scale, while that jalapeño you’ve just learned to love only measures a wimpy 4,000. But what exactly do these numbers mean, and how do they translate into useful information?

Scoville took the guesswork out of judging chiles. Let’s start with the invention of the Scoville scale, and then we’ll look at how different varieties of chiles rank in this heat hierarchy. In 1912, a man named Wilbur L. Scoville was working for a company that made an ointment for aching joints in which capsaicin, the heat-causing compound in chiles, was an important ingredient. The company was constantly frustrated because the heat level in chiles varied so much. Scoville devised a formal test in which exact weights of chiles were dissolved in alcohol and then added to sweetened water in precise measures. Tasters were asked to determine how much water was needed to neutralize the heat. A rating number was assigned, according to how many units of water were added before the chile’s heat became imperceptible.

Scoville’s test was used for the next six decades, yet it wasn’t totally reliable, given the fact that human testers’ palates are different and easily fatigued by repeated tastings of hot food. In 1980, a more objective test was introduced, the High-Pressure Liquid Chromatography Test, in which powdered chiles are dissolved and then analyzed through a light beam that shows the heat compounds as fluorescent. Most large producers use this test today, but because the Scoville name has been so deeply ingrained in the industry, they make a conversion and still express the pungency in Scoville units.

The Scoville scale ranks fire but not flavor. So what does any of this have to do with the flavor of chiles? Not much. These tests isolate only the heat-causing compounds, but tell us nothing about the overall flavor. The heat of a chile is found in the inner membrane, while the flavor comes from the meaty pod itself and makes all the difference in how we experience the heat. These tests also do nothing to discern how the heat is felt. As anyone who has eaten a lot of chiles will tell you, some, such as the habanero, deliver sharp, quick bursts of heat, while others, such as the fiery red Thai pepper, burn and linger. Some hit you up front on the lips and tip of the tongue, while others scorch your entire mouth and throat. Even the researchers themselves will admit that for all their accuracy, the pepper is a fickle plant: its heat varies widely from pod to pod, plant to plant, garden to garden, and season to season. Even on a single bush, a pod from the sunnier side will be hotter than one from the shady side. A quick look at a sample Scoville scale shows the wide variances within each type of chile.

The Scoville rating provides a good general measure of the relative heat of different chiles. In other words, you can be assured that a cayenne will be hotter than a poblano. But ultimately, taste remains a subjective experience. There’s no substitute for breaking open a chile and tasting it yourself (carefully) for flavor and, of course, for firepower.

THE RIGHT TECHNIQUE FOR THE RIGHT CHILI

Fresh chiles are becoming more available all the time, and few supermarkets are without the ubiquitous jalapeño. But the range in quality can be discouraging, and it can be difficult to distinguish fresh chiles from ones that have been on the shelves a while. When shopping for fresh chiles, look for those with smooth, tight skin and a thick, meaty body. A fresh chile should have some heft relative to its diminutive size.

If you won’t use your chiles right away, keep them cool and dry. You can refrigerate them, but be sure to first remove them from the plastic produce bag; otherwise, they’ll be-come soft and moldy. The length of time that chiles will stay fresh in the refrigerator depends on how fresh they were when you bought them, but generally they’ll keep for three or four days without suffering any loss of freshness. Once the chile’s skin begins to wrinkle, it will lose some of its potency, and if you’re roasting or blanching them, the skins will be difficult to peel.

THINK ABOUT SAFETY

Unless you have particularly tough hands, it’s a good idea to use rubber gloves when handling fresh chiles. Many cookbooks recommend using dishwashing gloves, but I find that these are rather clumsy and that getting a handle on small chiles while wearing them can be frustrating. Instead, I like to keep a few pairs of surgical gloves around the kitchen. Available at most drugstores, surgical gloves are cheap, disposable, and best of all, they allow you to get a firm grip on the chiles. Once you’ve begun working with the chiles, be extremely careful not to touch any part of your body, especially your eyes. After you’ve finished, wash your knife and cutting board with hot soapy water.  Protection with a grip. Surgical gloves protect sensitive skin from chiles’ painful sting, and they
improve your grip.

Capsaicin is the chemical compound that gives chiles their heat. An alkaloid, capsaicin is distributed throughout the chile, but the heaviest concentration of capsaicin is found in the white pith on the inside of the chile–those ribs that hold the seeds in place. Further down on the scale of concentration are the seeds and then the chile’s flesh, which has the least amount of capsaicin. This gives you a convenient way of controlling the amount of heat that the chile contributes to a dish. To get the most bang out of the chile, use it whole; for a milder flavor, simply trim out the seeds and ribs.

CUTTING CHILES THE EASY WAY

Start by cutting off the entire stem, and then slice the chile in half lengthwise. With the tip of a paring knife, you can remove the seeds and ribs by slicing or nudging them with the knife point. With seeds and ribs out of the way, the chiles are easily cut into strips or a fine dice.

Stemming and seeding a chile. After removing the stem, slice the chile lengthwise to expose the seeds and ribs. Remove the seeds and ribs to moderate the heat, or leave them in for extra punch.

REMOVING THE SKINS

Many dishes, especially Mexican and Southwestern recipes, call for the chiles to be peeled. You can do this by first charring or blanching the whole chiles. To char, rub them with a little oil and then set them directly over a gas burner. Turn the chiles frequently with tongs or a fork to prevent burning through to the flesh. When the skins have charred and blistered slightly, pop the chiles into a plastic bag and let them steam in their own juices for about 20 minutes. The skins should now rub off easily.

Blanching chiles won’t give you the smoky flavor that charring does, but the technique is great if you don’t have a gas stove. Simply drop the chiles into boiling water for 30 seconds or so, and then plunge them into ice water. Once the chiles have cooled, they can be skinned just as if they were charred.

DRYING CHILI PEPPERS

Drying chiles is one of the best ways to preserve your harvest, but be sure to dry them when they’re fully ripe for the finest flavor. For poblanos, this means when they turn bright red. Any type of chile can be dried by one of the following methods, except for jalapeños, which do best when they’re smoke-dried (turning them into chipotles). Don’t try drying chiles with black spots; they’ll turn moldy and rot.

If you live in a dry climate, the simplest way to dry the chiles is to tie them on a string by their stems, in clusters of three, and hang them in the sun. This is called a ristra. When the pods are dry but still pliable (this could take weeks, depending on the heat and humidity), hang them indoors and out of direct sunlight to finish drying.

In areas of high humidity, the chiles might rot before the sun can dry them, so your best bet is to halve them lengthwise and use the oven (or a food dehydrator). In a gas oven, set the halved chiles directly on a baking sheet and dry them using just the heat from the pilot light. This may take a couple of days or longer. In an electric oven, the chiles will dry much faster. Set the oven to low, about 175°F, and check the chiles every  few minutes to make sure they don’t burn.  The chiles are fully dry when they snap, not just bend. Store them in sealed glass jars in a cupboard, or in the freezer double-wrapped in freezer bags. (Don’t put bagged chiles in a cupboard because the plastic is porous and the chiles can oxidize, ruining both the color and the flavor.) With both storage methods, dried chiles last indefinitely.

To reconstitute the chiles, soak them in hot water for about 15 minutes, fry them in a bit of oil until they puff up, or lightly roast them. Dried chiles can also be ground to a powder when you’re ready to use them (no earlier, because the powder would lose its flavor).

Chili Peppers: Global Warming

By Simon Robinson-Tezpur, India

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus set off from Spain to find a westward route to Asia, he was looking to secure Europe's kitchen, not change it. Europeans had used black pepper as a medicinal aid and to spice up their cooking since Greek and Roman times. The ingredient, imported from the Spice Islands of Asia, had fueled the economies of trading ports like Alexandria, Genoa and Venice. But by the Middle Ages, black pepper had become a luxury item, so expensive that it was sold by the corn and used to pay rent and taxes. When the traditional land and sea routes to Asia were cut off by the rise of the Ottoman Empire, European traders looked for new ways to India and the lands beyond — not just for pepper but for other lucrative spices, and for silks and opium. Columbus headed west, certain he would find a new route to the East Indies. He never got there, of course, but in the islands of the New World the Italian navigator found a fiery pod that would, within years, not only infuse southern European cooking with bold new flavors but also revolutionize cooking in India, China and Thailand, the very places he'd set out to reach.

The remarkable spread of the chili (or chilli, or chile, or chile pepper, to use just a few of its myriad names and spellings) is a piquant chapter in the story of globalization. Few other foods have been taken up by so many people in so many places so quickly.

Ask a Chinese chili lover or an Indian or a Thai and most will swear that chilies are native to their homeland, so integral is the spice to their cooking, so deeply embedded is it in their culture. European and American chili addicts, though less numerous, are just as passionate about the spice.  In terms of keeping billions of people fed, the chili can hardly compare to rice or corn or even potatoes, of course. But by adding spice to such staples, by making even the poorest food rich in flavor, the chili has become one of the most important ingredients in the world. For hundreds of millions of poor, chilies are the one luxury they can afford every day, a small burst of flavor in the slums of Asia or the parched grazing land of West Africa.

The secret to the chili's success lies in the fantastically colorful pods themselves: the chemicals that make them so hot and addictive. "Once we develop a taste for hot food, which provides a high, there is no going back," says renowned Indian cook Madhur Jaffrey. "It turns into a craving." The chili, she says, is not so much a seed of change "as a conqueror, or, better still, a master seducer."

Chilies are native to South America, where people have been cultivating and trading them for at least 6,000 years. Linda Perry, a postdoctoral fellow in archaeobiology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, has identified microfossils of the starch grains found in chilies on grinding stones and cooking pots unearthed in the Caribbean, Venezuela and the Andes. In a paper published in Science last February, she and fellow researchers found that domesticated chilies were being eaten in southern Ecuador some 6,250 years ago. Because there are no wild chilies in southern Ecuador, domesticated plants must have been brought there from elsewhere, perhaps from Peru or Bolivia where, according to Perry and other scientists, chilies were probably first grown by humans. "For whatever reason, a lot of people really liked them," Perry says. "Once they were domesticated, they spread very quickly around South America and into Central America."

Chilies belong to the genus Capsicum, a member of the nightshade family that includes tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants. Only five of Capsicum's 25 species have been cultivated, and in South America, where most of the world's wild chilies are still found, chilies' shapes and colors are far more varied than the classic curved red or green ones of Mexican cooking or the small bullet-shaped "bird's-eye" chilies used in Thai cooking, or the sweet green and orange bell peppers or capsicums found in a million salads. There are pea-shaped chilies, heart-shaped chilies, chilies with the bumps and nodes of a surrealist brain, and chilies that are flat and long like a bean. They come in purple, rusty red, yellow, black, bright orange and lime green. "There are thousands of types and we're still discovering new ones," says Paul Bosland, director of the Chile Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University in Santa Fe. "The variations are incredible."

By the time Columbus sailed into the Caribbean in the late 15th century, chilies were a long-established part of most diets across the Americas. But as British author Lizzie Collingham relates in her excellent history Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, which tells the story of India and its rulers through their food, Europeans initially weren't that enamored with the new spice that Columbus brought back from the New World. "On the Iberian peninsula," writes Collingham, "chilies were grown more as curious ornamental plants than as sources of a fiery flavoring." But if Europeans didn't immediately fall for the chili, they did become its greatest propagator. Portuguese traders carried it to settlements and nascent colonies in West Africa, in India and around East Asia. Within 30 years of Columbus' first journey, at least three different types of chili plants were growing in the Portuguese enclave of Goa, on India's west coast. The chilies, which probably came from Brazil via Lisbon, quickly spread through the subcontinent, where they were used instead of black pepper.

In Thailand, a short-lived Portuguese presence failed to convert the locals to Christianity but succeeded in revolutionizing the Thai kitchen. European traders introduced the spice to Japan. As chilies were added to the cooking pots of Asia, they also entered existing local trade routes and were taken to Indonesia, Tibet and China. The speed of their spread was phenomenal. Within a half-century of chilies arriving in Spain, they were being used across much of Asia, along the coast of West Africa, through the Maghreb countries of North Africa, in the MiIn recent years, chilies have returned to Europe from Asia on the menus of Indian and Thai restaurants. Indian food is now the most popular cuisine in Britain. In 2001 then Foreign Minister Robin Cook called chicken tikka masala — a British invention that mixes chicken, cream and tomato puree with chili and other spices — the country's national dish. In the U.S. — where, of course, the chili had arrived thousands of years ago from further south — Mexican food is ever more popular; salsas and chili sauces have outsold tomato-based ketchup since the early 1990sddle East, in Italy, in the Balkans and through Eastern Europe as far as present-day Georgia. Chilies spread so quickly in part because they are easy to grow in a wide range of climates and conditions, and therefore cheap and always available. "It was something spicy that now anybody could afford," says Bosland. "It was probably the very first plant that was globalized."

It wasn't the only new plant on the market, of course. Columbus returned from his journeys with baskets of strange vegetables and fruits including tomatoes, potatoes and corn. But nothing spread as fast as chilies. Bosland believes it was because people thought the red pods were a new type of black pepper. "People are very conservative when it comes to food," he says. "But here was something that they thought they knew, only it was spicier and easier to grow and get hold of." Tomatoes and potatoes took much longer to spread through Europe and Asia.