A Culinary Tour
It may come as a shock to the good cooks of India, China, Thailand, Korea and Singapore that one of their sustaining spices — the chile pepper — wasn’t available to them until the 16th century, after Columbus brought them back from the New World to Spain. The Spanish and Portuguese introduced them to Africa and Asia soon after.
See our slideshow of Mexican chilies.
In Mexico, cooks have used them for a lot longer (say, 9,000 years) and they’ve been cultivating them since 3500 B.C. To this day chilies — of which there are more than 300 varieties — are every bit as central to their regional cookery as they were before the Spanish arrived. The word “chile” itself derives from the Nuhuatl word stem chil (which also meant red) for the pepper.
The Aztecs and Mayans had an extremely varied diet, highly spiced with scores of different chilies that went into just about everything they cooked, including mole sauces; Montezuma put them in his daily ration of 50 cups of hot chocolate. Later, when the Spanish brought in pigs, sheep and cattle, Mexican cooks had new palettes with which to work with chilies.
Mexican staples like frijoles refritos, quesadillas, gorditas, carnitas, tamales, tacos and tortillas came later with the mixing of animal fats and chilies. What you will not find in Mexico is the Tex-Mex creation called chile con carne, first mentioned in American print in 1828 to describe a chile-rich stew enjoyed by the poor people of San Antonio. But the item never caught on in Mexico, where the compiler of the Diccionario de Mejicanismos described the dish as “a detestable food with a false Mexican title which is sold in the United States from Texas to New York.” So enough said about that.
In Mexico, people are particularly proud of their indigenous chilies, and name them accordingly. The poblano, for instance, is a chile pepper from Puebla, and the tabasco from Tabasco. Chilhuacle chilies come from Oaxaca, and chiapas from Chiapas. The chilaca hails from Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Zacatecas, the habanero from the Yucatán (the Mayans’ favorite), the manzana from Michoacán, the costeño from Guerrero (there called Bandeño), and the de árbol from Jalisco. Others, like the jalapeño (originally from Jalapa) and serrano are ubiquitous, and easily found north of the border. Dried chilies often have different names from the fresh chilies they are made from.
Many of these chilies are available throughout Mexico now, and cooks have wide access to them, using one or the other for a particular level of spice and heat. More...
See our slideshow of Mexican chilies
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See our slideshow of Mexican chilies.
So which chilies are the hottest, and how are they ranked?
Chilies’ hotness is judged by something called the Scoville Scale, established by a Detroit pharmacologist named Wilbur L. Scoville whose company, Parke Davis, used chilies in its Heet muscle salve.
Habanero: 300,000
Pequin: 50,000-100,000
Cayenne: 50,000
De Árbol: 15,000-30,000
Serrano: 10,000-23,000
Chipotle: 2,500-5,000
Guajillo: 2,500-5,000
Jalapeño: 2,500-5,000
Ancho: 1,000-5,000
Chilaca: 1,000-5,000
Poblano: 1,000-1,500
Scoville made an alcohol solution with various peppers diluted with sugar water and tested them on a panel of five volunteers. The numerical ratings were based on how the heat finally dissipated with the addition of more sugar water.
Thus, a pungency rating of 1,000 meant 1,000 units of water was needed to nullify the heat of an individual pepper. Later on, more high-tech methods were developed to rate pungency, but the use of the term Scoville units persists to this day.
The results depend on the individual samples, which may vary widely. But as you can see, the habanero is the spiciest chili on the market, by an order of magnitude. We recommend you handle that one with care. In our slideshow, you'll find a list of recommended restaurants in Mexico where you can enjoy some of these fine chilies in their appropriate contexts.