Chili pepper 🌶️

Beyond the heat, chillies are genuinely fruity — green ones grassy and sharp, ripe red ones sweeter and almost berry-like, smoked and dried ones deep and raisiny. The burn is a trigeminal sensation, not a taste.

Chili pepper is typically in season South Asia (Year-round; peak harvest after the monsoon); Latin America (Jul–Oct in temperate zones; year-round in the tropics). Peak months shift between the northern and southern hemispheres.

Remove the white pith to cut the heat, not the seeds — the capsaicin is in the membrane, and the seeds are only hot from touching it. Dairy, not water, relieves the burn: capsaicin is fat-soluble.

Fully coloured — usually red, though varieties ripen to orange, yellow, brown or purple — glossy and firm. Green chillies are unripe, and generally sharper and grassier rather than milder.

Chili pepper is a nutritious everyday fruit, best enjoyed as part of a varied diet. It is exceptionally rich in vitamin C — even a small portion far exceeds a day's needs — supporting immune function, collagen formation, and the absorption of iron from plant foods. It supplies useful potassium (about 340 mg per 100 g), a mineral linked with healthy blood pressure as part of a balanced diet.

A typical fruit serving is roughly a handful, one medium fruit, or about 80 g, and two or more varied fruit servings a day is a sensible everyday pattern.

No — this is the most persistent myth about chillies. Capsaicin is produced in the white pith, the placental membrane the seeds are attached to. The seeds themselves produce none; they simply sit against the hottest tissue and pick some up. If you want to reduce heat, scrape out the pale membrane and leave the seeds if you like. Removing seeds alone achieves very little.

Fat and dairy. Capsaicin is fat-soluble and essentially insoluble in water, so water and beer spread it around rather than removing it. Milk, yoghurt and lassi work on two counts: the fat dissolves the capsaicin, and casein protein helps lift it off the receptors. Bread, rice and oil help mechanically. There is a reason raita sits beside a hot curry.

Extraordinarily so by weight — around 243 mg per 100 g, higher than guava and roughly five times an orange. The catch is portion size: nobody eats 100 g of chilli. A single bird's-eye chilli weighs a couple of grams, so the practical contribution is small. It is a genuine nutritional fact and a misleading one if quoted without that context. Vitamin C was in fact first isolated from paprika peppers.

Because that is what capsaicin is for. It binds to the TRPV1 receptor, which mammals have and birds effectively do not — so a bird feels nothing. Mammals chew and destroy seeds; birds swallow them whole and disperse them intact over long distances. The plant evolved a compound that punishes precisely the wrong seed carrier and ignores the right one.