We’ll tell you when a bottle in your cellar reaches its window, or an ingredient you cook with comes into season.
Preparing
Rotate to portrait
PAIR is designed to be held upright. Turn your phone back to portrait to keep going.
Chilli
Capsicum annuum · Chilli pepper
51 varieties40 pairings
A chilli is the pungent fruit of Capsicum annuum and its relatives — the nightshade whose flesh carries capsaicin, the alkaloid that fools the body into feeling burning heat. Eaten fresh, dried, ground or roasted, it is the backbone of spicy cooking from Mexico to Sichuan.
Picking a good onedrag
UnderripeOverripe
Red ripeSweetest, fruitiest and hottest, and still firm. Chilli oil, sauces, roasting, or thread it on a string to dry.Peak
ColourTurned right through — bright, even red
The pressFirm, springs straight back
Cap and stalkCap green and tight, stalk firming
Smell at the capWarm and fruity over the green
Reading a just ripe one. Move the slider and the rest of this page — nutrition, pairings — re-scores with it.
What one gives you
73%
Usable yield
45 g · fresh pod, stem and seeds out
62 g
Typical weight
one specimen
Keeping ittap a band
Below 7 °C the skin pits, the seed cavity darkens and alternaria takes the calyx — a couple of weeks to show at 5 °C, only a few days at 0 °C. Red pods stand it better than green.
Humidity
90-95%
Fresh pods, this — not dried. Thin skin over a hollow shell, so it shrivels long before it rots; below 90% the shoulders wrinkle and the gloss goes flat.
Airflow
Loosely bagged
Moisture-retentive film buys about another week; sealed and wet, soft rot starts under the cap. Dried pods invert it — kept dry at 60-70% RH, a cupboard, not this cold chain.
Makes almost none, and little bothered by it
Nonclimacteric — it makes almost none, and USDA's own ethylene-damage list leaves peppers off it. A ripening room is still wrong: dosed ethylene softens more than it colours.