KASHMIRI CHILLI FLAKES

Chillies are best known for the heat they add to food, generated by the active component, Capsaicin.

ENGLISH NAME:

Kashmiri Chilli/chile/chili

HINDI NAME:

Mirch

SANSKRIT NAME:

Chillies have not been in India long enough to have a true Sanskrit name

LATIN NAME:

Capsicum

AROMA:

Hot and slightly sharp, not very pungent. Can be sweet, depending upon the type of chilli. The Kashmiri chilli is quite fruity.

PLANT FAMILY:

Solanaceae, nightshade family

REGION GROWN:

Not all Kashmiri chillies are grown in Kashmir, some are also grown inHamachal Pradesh.

PART OF PLANT USED:

Fruit/pod.Chillies can be picked when fully ripe or early. Ripe chillies can be a variety of colours – red, orange, yellow, green. Red varieties are usually green before they ripen; as they redden they tend to get hotter and sweeter.Chillies are often bought dried. There are a variety of ways to dry chillies depending on the variety. If the walls of the chilli are not too thick, the best way is to sun dry them.Ground chilli powder is widely available, although you should check the ingredients before you buy it – what is often sold as chilli powder is a mix of chilli and other spices such as cumin, coriander, black pepper, salt etc

PLANT DESCRIPTION:

Annual shrub, usually around 1-3 feet high.

CHARACTERISTICS:

Chillies are best known for the heat they add to food, generated by the active component, Capsaicin.If mild, it can gently warm the mouth and throat for a while after eating, if strong, it can literally feel like your mouth and throat are burning unbearably.Everyone has their stories and memories of eating too much chilli; a friend of ours took this to the extreme. He toasted some dried red birds eye chillies (the small, thin and very hot ones), and ground them into a fine powder. He then, inexplicably, decided that it would be a good idea to snort this powder. Words can’t adequately describe the pain he felt, but the fact it took fully 3½ hours before he regained the will to live should give you some idea! Life has a way of balancing things out, and our collective laughter balancing his pain was no doubt a great comfort to him.ScovilleScaleThe heat of chillies is most widely measured using the Scoville Scale. The original Scoville test involved a panel of tasters consuming increasingly dilute concentrations of various chillies until they ceased to taste hot. A numerical scale was worked out from this, with higher numbers indicating hotter chillies.Birds Eye chillies typically rate 100,000 – 225,000 Scoville Heat Units, whilst a Scotch Bonnet can range from 100,000 to 325,000 Units.Pepper spray ranges from 2 million units up to 5 million for police grade spray. Pure capsaicin powder measures 16 million units. Anyone working with this has to wear a protective body suit in a filtered tox-room.The world’s hottest chilli was thought to be the Naga Jalokia which is grown in the hilly regions of Assam in India. (Naga means ‘snake’ in Sanskrit.)However, Joy and Michael Michaud have produced what they call the Dorset Naga from their market garden in Dorset. It is a relative of the Scotch Bonnet which was originally selected from Naga Morich, a chilli prized by the Bangladeshi community in Britain. Their original propagating material was from a shop in the exotic town of Bournemouth, England! So, how hot is it? They explain: “In the summer of 2005, a sample of Dorset Naga was collected and subsequently tested for heat by two laboratories in the USA. The average of the two results, measured in Scoville Heat Units (SHU), was an astounding 923,000 SHU. Confirming the 2005 results, our 2006 crop of Dorset Naga was measured this autumn and came out to be 960,000 SHU. A second test in a different laboratory is still pending. High as our results were, BBC “Gardeners’ World” has recorded an even higher level. As part of its 2006 programming, the BBC gardening team ran a chilli trial looking at several varieties, including Dorset Naga. Heat levels were tested in a British laboratory and the Dorset Naga came in at almost 1.6 million SHU. However, few details about the sampling and testing techniques are available, and we are not fully confident of the extreme figure of 1.6 million – although the true level is still likely to be considerably higher than a million.To put these figures in context, up until last year the Guinness world record for the hottest chilli was held by the Red Savina chilli, with a one-time measurement of 577,000 SHU.” Since this was written, there are plenty of hotter chillies, with the ‘Pepper X’ peaking at over 3 million SHU! A couple of other Superhots achieving over 2 million SHU are the Carolina Reaper (over 200 times hotter than the Jalapeno) and the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. Whilst it’s obvious that not all chillies are created equal, even the heat of two chillies from the same plant picked at the same point of ripeness can vary wildly.

HISTORY:

The history of chilli starts 7500 years ago in Mexico according to Richard MacNeish, the renowned American archeologist. From as early as 5400BC Native Indians were cultivating chillies. In ‘The History of Food’ Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat writes: “Chillies and sweet peppers contain a great deal of Vitamins C and A. The chilli still helps the American Indian compensate for the poor vitamin content of their diet. Because of the ferocity of the chillies the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas used them in their techniques of torture. They also provided a poison in which arrows were dipped, and the same substance was used to poison reservoirs of water for fishing; fish which died of it were well spiced before they were even cooked. The chilli also has antiseptic powers, and its powder must be dusted over suspect food, or even used to fumigate a room.”Columbus is credited with introducing chillies to Europe (see the next point also) and, from there, India, China and beyond. It is bizarre to think that a spice whose associations are so closely tied with Indian food actually arrived there via Europe! There are two possible reasons for the plant being known as a chilli pepper – Columbus actually thought he had a red variant of the black pepper plant, hence the word ‘pepper’ in there title. The other is that he may have known that they weren’t black pepper, but tried to pass them off as pepper in order to ‘prove’ that he really had found a new fast route to Asia, and not mistakenly ended up in America!As you can see from the two theories surrounding the name ‘chilli pepper’, history is full of disagreements, many of them around spices. It is also thought possible, by some historians, that it was actually the Portuguese who, through Vasco de Gama, introduced the chilli to India after acquiring it in Spain.Chilli is now present in almost all cuisines of the world and there are over three thousand varieties.

POINTS OF INTEREST:

The history of chilli starts 7500 years ago in Mexico according to Richard MacNeish, the renowned American archeologist. From as early as 5400BC Native Indians were cultivating chillies. In ‘The History of Food’ Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat writes: “Chillies and sweet peppers contain a great deal of Vitamins C and A. The chilli still helps the American Indian compensate for the poor vitamin content of their diet. Because of the ferocity of the chillies the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas used them in their techniques of torture. They also provided a poison in which arrows were dipped, and the same substance was used to poison reservoirs of water for fishing; fish which died of it were well spiced before they were even cooked. The chilli also has antiseptic powers, and its powder must be dusted over suspect food, or even used to fumigate a room.Columbus is credited with introducing chillies to Europe (see the next point also) and, from there, India, China and beyond. It is bizarre to think that a spice whose associations are so closely tied with Indian food actually arrived there via Europe! There are two possible reasons for the plant being known as a chilli pepper – Columbus actually thought he had a red variant of the black pepper plant, hence the word ‘pepper’ in there title. The other is that he may have known that they weren’t black pepper, but tried to pass them off as pepper in order to ‘prove’ that he really had found a new fast route to Asia, and not mistakenly ended up in America!As you can see from the two theories surrounding the name ‘chilli pepper’, history is full of disagreements, many of them around spices. It is also thought possible, by some historians, that it was actually the Portuguese who, through Vasco de Gama, introduced the chilli to India after acquiring it in Spain.Chilli is now present in almost all cuisines of the world and there are over three thousand varieties.

AYURVEDIC PROPERTIES:

Cools vata and kapha, warms pitta. Has stimulant, antiseptic, antispasmodic, analgesic, antibacterial, carminative, diaphoretic, digestive, decongestant, and rubifacient actions. Stimulates digestion and so eases indigestion, stimulates endorphin production, helps with parasites, blood clots lungs – asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, tracheal and bronchial cell swelling, purifies blood and stimulates circulation.Research is ongoing into its beneficial effects upon prostate cancer and leukaemia. Energetics: pungent-hot-pungent

PRECAUTIONS:

Care when handling chillies is fairly obvious. Men in particular should exercise care when going to the loo after chopping chillies. Chilli stays on your fingers a long time!