Chili Pepper Substitutes

Have a spicy recipe that calls for hot peppers, chili powders, or chili flakes that are hard to find or currently not stocked in your kitchen? Take a look at our chili pepper substitute posts which cover your alternatives and offer thoughts on how the substitution could affect the flavor of your dish.

Datil Peppers

Datil Pepper Substitutes: What To Use Instead

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The datil has a specific problem: almost nobody can buy one fresh. It grows in and around St. Augustine, Florida, in small batches, for local families and local restaurants, and it barely leaves. So if a recipe calls for fresh datil peppers and you don’t …

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scotch bonnet substitute

What’s A Good Scotch Bonnet Pepper Substitute?

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Scotch bonnets are hard to find on purpose-built trips and nearly impossible on accidental ones. Outside the sub-tropics and neighborhoods with a strong Caribbean population, most supermarkets simply don’t carry them. So you find the jerk recipe, you read the ingredient list, and you’re stuck. …

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Chamoy substitutes: tamarind concentrate, li hing mui powder, umeboshi paste and plum sauce

What’s A Good Chamoy Substitute?

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Hot sauce is the wrong bottle. Chamoy is fruit, salt, sour and chili all at once, and the swaps that work are the ones already doing three of the four. Here’s what to reach for, and how much to use.

Hungarian Wax Pepper Substitute

What’s A Good Hungarian Wax Pepper Substitute?

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The Hungarian wax pepper brings a specific combination to a dish: a solid medium heat, 5,000 to 10,000 Scoville heat units (SHU), wrapped in a bright, sweet-tangy, almost pickle-ready flavor. Using PepperScale’s flavor families, it’s Green & Grassy chili with an unusually vivid tang, most …

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Serrano pepper substitute

What’s A Good Serrano Pepper Substitute?

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Serrano peppers are one of the most useful chilies you can cook with, but they can still be surprisingly hard to track down. And when they’re missing, the right substitute matters. Reach for the wrong one and you can lose the crisp, bright, grassy character …

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Aji limo peppers

What’s a Good Aji Limo Substitute?

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The aji limo is a hard chili to replace, because you’re really replacing two things at once: a solid medium heat (30,000 to 50,000 Scoville heat units) and a very specific bright, citrusy, floral aroma. Reach for the wrong stand-in and you can match the …

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California Chile

What’s A Good California Chile Substitute?

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The California chile — the dried, ripened form of the Anaheim — is one of the gentlest dried chilies in the Mexican pantry, and that mildness is exactly why it’s worth choosing a substitute carefully. Its job in a dish is rarely heat; it’s the …

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Anaheim pepper substitute

What’s a Good Anaheim Pepper Substitute?

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The Anaheim pepper is one of the mildest true chilies you can cook with, and that mildness is exactly why it’s worth choosing a substitute carefully. Reach for the wrong one and you can lose the crisp, faintly sweet character that makes the Anaheim so …

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Jalapeno substitute

What’s A Good Jalapeño Substitute?

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Jalapeño peppers are everywhere, so you’ll rarely be stuck without one. That makes “what’s a good jalapeño substitute?” less a rescue mission than a choice: do you want the same bright, grassy flavor with a different level of heat, do you just need fire, or …

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