Whole Dried Chillies

Whole dried chillies are ripe chillies dried with their skins intact, sold as sukhi lal mirch or vara milagai. Fried whole in hot oil with mustard seeds and curry leaves, they flavour sambar, rasam, dal tadka and poriyal. Soaked and ground, they make the red paste for vindaloo, Chettinad masala, Kashmiri rogan josh and Sri Lankan red curries.

Kashmiri chillies are long, wrinkled and mild, chosen for colour. Stemless chillies, sometimes sold as dandicut, have the stalks already removed, which saves time when grinding. Round chillies, gundu milagai, are plump and moderately hot, prized in Tamil kulambu. Mor milagai, also called salted or curd chillies, have been soaked in salted buttermilk and sun dried, and fried crisp they are eaten with curd rice and sambar rice. Dried green chillies have a sharper, grassier flavour.

To soak chillies for paste, snip off the stalks, shake out some seeds if you want less heat, and cover with just-boiled water for twenty minutes. When tempering, add them to oil that is hot but not smoking and pull the pan off as soon as they darken, since burnt chillies turn acrid. Store in a sealed jar away from light. See crushed chillies for flakes, Kashmiri chilli powder for the ground form, and the rest of our dried chillies.