Matt Bray 
The pasilla de Oaxaca is a hard chili to replace. It’s smoked over a wood fire for days, so it brings deep smoke, a dark dried-fruit sweetness, and real heat all at once, somewhere around 15,000 to 20,000 SHU. It’s also grown only in Oaxaca’s …
The pasilla de Oaxaca is a smoked chili pepper from one small corner of Mexico: the Sierra Mixe, in the mountains of northeastern Oaxaca, and nowhere else. It shares a name with the everyday pasilla, but in the kitchen they’re not the same thing. The …
If there’s a single word that sums up the year in heat, it isn’t “hottest.” It’s “swicy.” Sweet-and-spicy has gone from a niche flavor note to the thing every major brand is chasing, and the biggest launches of 2026 have leaned into flavor, fruit, and …
The datil has a specific problem: almost nobody can buy one fresh. It grows in and around St. Augustine, Florida, in small batches, for local families and local restaurants, and it barely leaves. So if a recipe calls for fresh datil peppers and you don’t …
There’s a certain kind of hot sauce fan who stopped chasing the Scoville leaderboard a while ago. They still love heat, but what pulls them across the room now is flavor: smoke, oak, a little sweetness, the sense that someone let the sauce sit and …
Chipotle powder answers a question that comes up constantly in home cooking: how do you get real smoke into a dish that never goes near a fire? It is ground chipotle pepper, which is a jalapeño left on the plant until it turns red and …
Scotch bonnets are hard to find on purpose-built trips and nearly impossible on accidental ones. Outside the sub-tropics and neighborhoods with a strong Caribbean population, most supermarkets simply don’t carry them. So you find the jerk recipe, you read the ingredient list, and you’re stuck. …
The scotch bonnet is the Caribbean’s signature chili: a squat, wrinkled, extra-hot pod that carries as much sweetness as it does fire. It’s the pepper behind jerk seasoning, behind most of the island hot sauces worth buying, and behind a heat that arrives a beat …
Hoisin on its own is already a fine glaze for grilled pork or chicken, but it isn’t barbecue sauce. Add ketchup, soy sauce, and rice wine vinegar and it becomes one: sweeter and deeper than a standard tomato sauce, with a savory backbone you don’t …
Blueberries and jalapeño sound like a mistake until you taste them together. The berries bring a dark, mellow sweetness, the pepper brings a bright green snap, and the gap between the two is the whole point of the salsa. It takes fifteen minutes, there’s no …
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