Cooking with Chili Peppers

If you want to cook with more confidence, having solid, easy-to-follow instructions is the best tool in your kitchen. Bookmark this page to save all of my chili pepper guides, ingredient explainers, preserving tutorials, homemade pantry staples, substitution guides, and kitchen how-tos that make it easier to handle peppers, build flavor, and figure out what to use when you’re out of something.

A bunch of tomatillos, ready for cooking

Chili Pepper Basics, Heat Levels, and Pepper Guides

When you’re working with peppers, a little background goes a long way. Let me help you understand heat levels, pepper types, and how peppers behave in the kitchen so it’s easier to choose the right one for your recipe.

Cooking with Chili Peppers and Pepper Harvest Guides

If you have a lot of peppers to use up or want better ways to cook with them, keep these posts handy. They help with fresh pepper harvests, frozen peppers, superhot peppers, pepper burn, and everyday kitchen questions that come up when you cook with chiles often.

Preserving Peppers, Drying Peppers, and Pepper Storage

If you have more peppers than you can use right away, you're in the right spot. We cover freezing, drying, roasting, pickling, smoking, fermenting, and storage so you can make the most of a harvest without letting anything go to waste. See my full collection of Recipes for Preserving Chili Peppers for more options.

Homemade Hot Sauce, Chili Oil, and Chili Paste Guides

If you like making your own spicy pantry staples, we're here to help you make hot sauce, chili oil, chili paste, and other pepper-based flavor boosters that keep well and make weeknight cooking a lot more interesting.

Homemade Pantry Staples and Kitchen Basics

These are the kinds of from-scratch basics that make home cooking easier and more flexible. They’re good to have around when you want to skip store-bought shortcuts and build meals with ingredients you already know how to use.

Spice Blends, Chili Powders, and Seasoning Guides

A good spice blend can change a whole meal, and we make it easier to understand what to use and how to use it.

More Spice and Pantry Ingredient Guides

Some ingredients show up often enough that it helps to actually know what they are before cooking with them. If you want a clearer sense of how an ingredient tastes, where it fits, and what to reach for when you do not have it on hand, don't skip these posts.

Chile Paste, Sauce, and Fermented Ingredient Guides from Around the World

If you like branching out into new ingredients, I will help you make sense of pepper pastes, bean pastes, and flavor bases that appear in recipes from different cuisines and can completely change a dish's flavor.

Sauce and Condiment Substitute Guides

These are the recipes to reach for when you’re halfway through a recipe and realize something is missing. They help you keep cooking without losing essential flavors, which makes them especially handy for weeknight dinners and pantry cooking.