If chili pepper flakes have turned up in a recipe or caught your eye at the store, here's what you need to use them with confidence and how to choose them, cook them, store them, what to substitute, and 30 recipes to try them in.

What are chili pepper flakes?

Chili pepper flakes, also called crushed red pepper, are dried red chiles broken into coarse bits with the seeds left in. That mix of skin and seed is why they look uneven in the jar.

It also explains the two-part heat: a slow warmth from the flesh and a sharper hit from the seeds.

Most supermarket flakes are a blend, often built around cayenne and similar dried reds, landing somewhere around 15,000 to 30,000 Scoville. Hot, but the loose grind spreads that heat out so it feels gentler than the number suggests.

This is the shaker on the pizzeria table and the easiest way to add background heat to almost anything savory.

How to Use Chili Flakes

The single best trick is to bloom them in fat. Warm a spoonful in olive oil or butter over low heat for a minute and the heat and color seep into the oil, turning flat flakes into something fragrant and rounded.

That is the move behind a good aglio e olio or a chili oil drizzle. Sprinkled on at the end instead, they stay sharp and raw, which is what you want shaking them over a finished pizza or bowl of soup.

They carry long-cooked and bold dishes well. Sichuan Sticky Ribs lean on them for steady background heat, and a Thai Tamarind Chicken Stir Fry uses a pinch to lift the sauce.

A note on Korean recipes: dishes like Easy Kimchi and Bibimbap traditionally call for gochugaru, a softer, fruitier Korean flake. Ordinary crushed red pepper is hotter and rougher, so start with about half the amount and add more to taste.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Chili flakes belong to the whole Italian pantry: garlic, olive oil, tomatoes, cured pork, anchovy, lemon, and hard cheese. They cross over to the Asian side just as easily with soy, sesame, and ginger.

The most common mistake is adding them raw at the end when a dish needed them bloomed. Without time in heat or fat, the flavor stays one-dimensional and a little dusty.

The other is treating old flakes as if they were fresh. They fade fast, so what worked from a new jar may do nothing from a tired one.

Substitutes

For straight heat, cayenne pepper is the closest pantry swap, but it is a fine powder with no texture and roughly twice the punch by volume. Use about half as much cayenne as flakes, then adjust.

A pinch of any ground dried chile or a few dashes of hot sauce will also cover heat in a cooked dish.

For the fruitier, milder profile of Korean cooking, gochugaru is the right call rather than crushed red pepper. In a real pinch, finely chop a dried red chile and you have rough flakes of your own.

Buying and Storage

Buy flakes in small jars unless you cook with them constantly. Like all ground spices they lose punch over time, fading noticeably after about six months even sealed.

Store them in an airtight container in a cool, dark cupboard, away from the heat and steam of the stove, which dulls them faster than anything.

Two quick freshness checks. The flakes should still smell distinctly of chile when you open the jar, and a pinch on the tongue should bite back. If they smell like nothing and taste flat, they are spent and will not season a dish properly.

Quick facts

In Chinese

辣椒片

British (UK) term

Chili pepper flakes

en français

flocons de piment

en español

hojuelas de pimiento chile

Recipes using chili pepper flakes

There are 30 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 30 recipes