The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

Bottled chili powder is fine in a pinch, but to get the
ultimate chili, my first plan of action was to ditch the
powdered spices and premixed chili powders and go straight
to the source: real dried chiles. Dried either in the sun, over
a smoky fire (in the case of smoked chiles like chipotles), or
—more commonly these days—in humidity- and wind-
controlled rooms, dried chiles have remarkably complex
flavors. Just like meat that is aged, as a chile dries, it loses
moisture, concentrating its flavorful compounds inside each
cell. These compounds come into closer contact with each
other, allowing them to react and produce new flavors that
weren’t present in the fresh pepper.
Dried chiles are available in a baffling array, so to make
my selection easier, I decided to taste every variety of whole
chile I could find, taking note of both its spice level and its
flavor profile. I noticed that most of them fell into one of