How To Dry Your Mexican Chilies. It’s All About Science

I have to say that there are laws or standards for everything, especially when it comes to food. I like spicy foods and chilies, irrespective of their origin: Mexican, European, African, Asian etc. I like them raw, dried, in flakes, powder etc.

Credit: http://www.unece.org

Both of my grandmas dried chilies some time ago although they were not spicy, we used them as smoked paprika powder. They never told me there was a special technique in drying chilies: basically, they would hang them on a rope, let the sun do his job for some weeks and eventually smoke them in the open fire oven. That was it and the result was fantastic.

Now, all of a sudden, I gather there are international organizations as the Economic Commission for Europe of the United Nations who are developing and adopting standards for Dry and Dried Produce like chilies.

There are already some 22 existing standards in dry and dried produce. The first chili standard includes provisions related to quality (such as minimum requirements for whole dried chilli peppers to be intact, sound and clean, etc.), sizing, tolerances for defects, presentation (such as packaging specifications), and marking.

I admit that things looked a lot more meaningful in my grandma’s garden than in this standard. Why complicate simple things for trade purposes and transform them into a whole science?