Fresh chillies add a sparkle to many dishes, not just curries or Asian ones. Dried chillies, including chilli powder, add a richer warmth, especially when cooked slowly.
Dried or fresh, using two or three different chillies, or dried for flavour and fresh for colour and texture, will give a greater complexity and more layers to a dish.
Lots of books tell you to wear gloves when preparing chillies – while this will mean you will not irritate your skin, especially the sensitive skin around the eyes and nose, by forgetting, and touching your face with hot fingers, wearing gloves may put you at greater danger of slipping with the knife and cutting yourself. It can be safer not to wear gloves, just be very conscious of not touching your face, and wash your hands, knife and board in warm soapy water immediately the job is done – and still be careful not to touch your eyes for some time.
The hottest part of the chilli is the white tissue that the seeds attach to. If you want to reduce the heat of a dish cut away this tissue and the seeds rather than use fewer chillies – remember chillies are there for flavour, not just for heat.
Like their bigger, milder cousins, red capsicums, fresh chillies will benefit from a roasting – this is especially true of green chilies, which will lose their raw flavour being roasted. Coat them with a little oil and put them on a rack in an oven at 200C or more. Watch and turn them until all the skin is blackened and blistered. Then put them in a plastic bag to sweat for about 10 minutes. Then the bitter skins can be rubbed off. Do a batch together and freeze the roasted chillies you do not need immediately.
Dried chillies are available in a greater variety than fresh, and they also have a greater complexity of flavour – the drying process caramelises the sugars in the chillies. Dried chillies need to be reconstituted – try soaking them in beer for three or four hours, before making them into a paste – or use them as they are in slow-cooking “wet†dishes such as curries and casseroles.
Use dried chilli flakes as a condiment on pizza or lamb dishes.
Use a flourish of Waji’s Green or Red Chilli Oil at serving to give a lift a soup, fish or curry. They will also enhance dishes based on tomatoes, such as pasta sauces.
Chillies vary greatly in hotness and flavour, but a rule of thumb is the smaller the chilli the hotter it will be. Green chillies tend to be hotter than red ones, and red ones sweeter than green.
Teaming chillies with chocolate in eating or drinking chocolate or in icecream may seem the utmost in trendiness, but in fact, the Aztecs were doing it when Columbus stumbled upon them.
Too hot to handle?
If a dish you have cooked is too chilli-hot add cream, yoghurt or coconut milk to it, according to what is used in it in the first place.
However, even if you taste as you go, what suits the cook or half the guests, can be too hot for some. The uninitiated traveller in India can find the inside of their mouth jittering about as if it had received an electric shock.
The suggestions of what to gulp down at the table if you find chilli is too hot for you range from dairy foods such as milk or yoghurt (especially with cucumber as in a raita often served with Indian curries), plain boiled rice, banana, a spoonful of sugar, honey or ice cream.
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