Hot Chili Powder - Ground Egyptian Shatta, Genuinely Hot

This one is hot, and we would rather say so at the top than have you find out over dinner. It is milled from whole dried red shatta including the seeds, which is where much of the burn sits, and it is a long way from the mild red powder sold as chilli in a lot of supermarkets. Start with a quarter teaspoon in a dish for four and go up from there.

Shatta is the everyday Egyptian chilli. It is the red heat that arrives beside koshari in a little bowl, that gets stirred into ful, that goes onto grilled fish at a seafront place in Alexandria. Dried and milled it becomes this: the same heat in a form that keeps, travels and measures out precisely.

The burn is capsaicin, which is worth knowing two things about. It concentrates in the pale pith the seeds are attached to rather than in the flesh, which is why a whole-chilli grind like this one is hotter than a powder made from flesh alone. And it dissolves in fat and alcohol but not in water, which is why bread, rice, yoghurt or milk help after too enthusiastic a spoonful and a glass of water does almost nothing.

We do not print a Scoville figure, because we do not have a measured one and an invented number would be worse than none. Chilli heat also genuinely varies between crops and seasons in a way that a single printed figure would misrepresent. What we can tell you is the honest practical answer: taste a few grains on a fingertip before you cook with a new pouch, and judge the pot from there.

Heat also arrives on a delay. It builds for a minute or two after you taste, so the classic mistake is to taste, decide it needs more, add more, and then meet the first spoonful properly a minute later. Season it, wait, then decide. There is no way back once it is in.

When you add it changes what it does. Stirred in early it dissolves into the dish as an integrated background warmth that lifts everything without announcing itself. Added at the end it stays sharp and sits on top, which is what you want in a shatta-style sauce or scattered over something grilled. Like paprika it scorches quickly in hot oil, so bloom it briefly and off the heat if you bloom it at all.

It is worth being clear about what this is not. It is not paprika and will not do paprika's colouring job at any sensible quantity. It is not a Mexican-style chilli powder either, which is a blend containing cumin, oregano and garlic - this is pure ground chilli and nothing else. If you want colour and sweetness, buy the sweet paprika instead.

Peppers reached Egypt through the Ottoman world and were absorbed completely into the traditional cooking of the country, to the point that shatta on the table is now simply what an Egyptian meal looks like. That is offered as history rather than as a health claim, and it is not medical advice.