How Do You Make Dried Chiles Less Spicy

There are several ways to make a chile pepper less spicy and tone down their fiery nature. You can do this by pure mechanics and take the seeds and membranes out of a pepper. You can leach it from the chile pepper in vinegar or alcohol. You can roast or grill chiles at high heat, which degrades capsaicin and makes it less pungent. Or you can temper heat with dairy or fatty foods, which bind to capsaicin and help flush it away. 

Chile peppers are tasty little packages of heat and flavor that contain the irritant capsaicin, a resinous compound that evolved in chiles as a deterrent—if it’s too hot, an animal won’t eat it. Unfortunately for chile peppers, evolution lost and we love the spicy sensation we get from hot peppers. While we can’t take every trace of heat out of a chile pepper, we can help you mellow the heat so your recipes can be enjoyed by one and all, and not just the brave few who live for a scorching-hot menu. 

 

How To Get The Most Heat Out Of A Chile Pepper

Capsaicin isn’t water-soluble, so you can’t just wash it away, though you can wash off some of the parts of the pepper that contain capsaicin. It’s mostly found in the seeds, membrane, and white pith in peppers. In fresh peppers, it’s easy to remove; you just need to take a spoon and scrape along the inside of a pepper, and then rinse it to remove any residual bits of seeds or pith. Dried chiles and fresh chiles are different, though, and dried chiles can be a little bit more difficult to tame. The dry seeds will easily fall out once you pull out the stem or cut through the wall of the chile, but the pith and membrane have dried along the chile’s interior flesh and have essentially adhered to it. They can be more of a challenge to remove. To pull even more heat out of a chile after you’ve de-seeded the pepper, we recommend a good soak.

As always, if you’re new to working with chile peppers, are pulling the seeds and pith from chiles, are handling a large amount of chiles, or are cooking very hot chiles, we recommend that you wear gloves, don’t touch your eyes, and wash your hands frequently with soap. Capsaicin is a resin that binds to the skin—any skin, your tongue, your fingers, the soft mucous membranes of your eyes—and triggers receptors in the skin so it feels like it’s being burned. It’s very easy, when trying to de-seed a pepper, to spread the capsaicin that’s attached to your fingers, elsewhere on the body. While low-heat peppers may result in nothing more than a mild annoyance, negligent handling of high-heat peppers can be quite painful.

 

Do I Need To Soak Chiles

Dried chiles are often soaked in hot water to prepare them for mashing or slicing, but as we mentioned earlier, capsaicin is not water-soluble. Soaking them simply in water, or even in soda water, will simply get the capsaicin wet, but it won’t diminish the number of Scoville Heat Units at all. The easiest way to pull the capsaicin out of a dried chile is in alcohol or vinegar. Alcohol is the more effective of the two methods; pour some tequila or vodka over hot peppers and let it sit for about an hour. This works for both red and green chile peppers. The peppers will be decidedly sweeter at the end of that hour and, as a bonus, once you strain the chiles you’ll be left with an infused alcohol that you can use as a mixer in your favorite adult beverage. If you choose to use vinegar, you need to let the peppers sit for more like two hours for the maximum amount of heat to leach out. Again, you can strain the peppers and save the spicy vinegar for surprising, kicked-up vinaigrettes or relishes. 

Vinegar works because it is acidic, and other acidic foods—like tomatoes, lemons, or limes—can help calm the fire from a chile pepper, particularly if the tomatoes are not themselves infused with chiles in a salsa or other spicy application. And while capsaicin isn’t water-soluble, it can’t say the same for how it responds to fats. Full-fat milk, and dairy items like soft cheese or cream sauce, contains a protein that binds to capsaicin and helps it wash away. This is why people who’ve handled very hot chiles by mistake will soak their hands in milk; it breaks the bonds the capsaicin has with your skin and helps soothe the burn. Rich and fatty avocados also create the same effect, grabbing the capsaicin so it doesn’t bind to your tongue and initiate the heat response. 

 

Does Cooking Dried Chiles Make Them Less Hot? Does Boiling Destroy Capsaicin?

The good news is, cooking dried chiles can make them less hot! Though it depends on which type of cooking method you choose. Capsaicin will start to break down when it’s exposed to temperatures higher than 400°F, so putting them in an oven to roast or over the high heat of a grill will mellow the heat. Cooking with low heat works in a different way; if you’re cooking a fatty piece of meat at a low-and-slow temperature—something like brisket in a smoker—then the fats from the meat will bind to the capsaicin and carry it away as it renders out. It won’t take out all the heat, but you can expect the heat to be reduced as much as 30%, depending on the process and the cooking time. Losing 30% of its heat will make a jalapeno much more mellow, but it will take a Ghost Chile down to about 665,000 SHU, which is still crazy, crazy hot. 

Boiling dried chiles doesn’t do much to capsaicin; it’s considered a heat-stable compound below 400°F, and water reaches its boiling point at 212°F, far below the temperature which will affect capsaicin. This is why you can use boiling water to rehydrate chiles, though you should not leave them in the water for too long.  When cooked for a longer period of time, hotter steam will pull out some of the capsaicin, but not enough to make that much of a difference, and water will pull out water-soluble compounds, like sugars. If the peppers are being boiled in a stock or sauce which you plan to eat in its entirety then those flavors won’t be lost, they’ll simply leach into the boiling liquid. If you’re boiling them in water and plan to drain the water away, then you’ll be left with a bowl of relatively bitter, but still spicy, chile peppers.