Chilli Pepper (Hot) recipes

Blistered fresh chillies and salty pan-fried halloumi are piled onto warm homemade flatbreads with a cool, garlicky cucumber yoghurt. This is a proper weeknight dinner — fast, satisfying, and the kind of thing you will make on rotation through late summer when your chilli plants are going mad. The chillies are the point here, roasted directly in the pan until they char and soften into something sweet, smoky, and genuinely hot.

This slow-cooked Italian-style ragu uses hot chillies as a principal flavouring agent rather than a background accent, in the tradition of the Calabrian cooking from southern Italy where chilli and pork are a fundamental pairing. The chillies collapse into the sauce over two hours, lending heat, fruitiness and colour that builds through the whole bowl. Serve over pappardelle with a generous hand of Parmesan.

A deeply savoury American-Southern-style cornbread packed with diced fresh hot chillies throughout — not stirred in as an afterthought, but enough to give every single bite a slow, building heat. The crumb is moist and tender, the crust is crisp from a cast-iron pan, and it is done in under 40 minutes from start to finish. Serve warm alongside beans, chilli or grilled sweetcorn.

A deeply flavoured Mexican-style table salsa where the chillies are genuinely in charge. Tomatoes and tomatillos provide acidity and body, but it is the fire-blistered chillies — roasted until their skins blacken and their flesh turns jammy — that define the whole thing. This is not a pourable sauce but a thick, smoky, spoonable salsa that improves enormously after an hour in the fridge.