Which kind of fresh chillies does Mamta use in her recipes please. Small Bird's Eye Thai chillies or the larger ones? Don't want to risk blowing anyone's head off! Also, roughly how many chillies are equivalent to 1 tsp of chilli powder please.

Hi Gill

I do not eat very hot food often, so I use the ordinary green chillies that you get from Indian grocers. Birds eye, Naga and similar are too hot for me! Chillies are seldom sold by names by Indian grocers. Thin ones are usually the hottest.

Mamta

the Thai chillies are ideal for Indian food, IMHO, though I wouldn't call them bird's eye, those tend to be smaller, much hotter, and are grown in NE India, sometimes called dani.

Other chillies which may be used in Indian cooking are cayenne (the variety, not the generic term for chilli pepper) and tabasco types. The larger Mexican/American varieties I would pass on, their skins are too thick, and some, like jalapeno, are not hot enough. IMHO, chillies for most Indian regional cooking should be thin skinned, and not blisteringly hot (unless you come from AP).

Broadly agree with Lapis plus I also wouldn't use habaneros or Scotch Bonnets, as I find the taste too fruity and oddly matched with Indian cooking (love the heat though). Difficult to quantify the number of fresh chillies that are equivalent to a teaspoon of average strength chilli powder as it depends on which variety of fresh chilli is used, whether they are sliced/blended or kept whole and at which point the chillies are added to the dish in its cooking process. Having said all of that, I would roughly count 5 normal Indian Cayenne finger chillies to 1 teaspoon of medium chilli powder. I often add approx. 5 whole green chillies at the end of cooking (sometimes slightly slit) for mainly aroma and in this case, not much heat is added at all, unless you bite into one!

Danbob raises a good point, when to add the chillies.

Certainly the heat (from capsaicin)and colour are both oil soluble, so to extract the heat and colour needs heating in hot oil/fat, or leaving to marinate overnight with oil. This way, the heat is reasonably evenly distiributed in a dish. If fresh green chillies are added, not much of the heat gets out of the fruit, and remains intact to bite into, with the usual reactions!! Leaving a cooked dish overnight has the same result. It is therefore important, to get the hotness from chillies (dry or fresh) they must be extracted into the oil/fat, and this is easily done by mashing the chilli, or liquidizing with oil before adding to the dish, or with water if the dish is going to have a long slow cook (kormas, for instance).

I would also agree that habaneros have too fruity a flavour for Indian dishes, but I have found Scotch bonnets OK, maybe the ones I used were not typical, but generally I would use the small Thai ones.