CHILIHEAT
Bring the heat — chili peppers, Scoville, and hot-sauce making.
From estimating a pepper blend’s Scoville heat and dialing in a ferment brine to swapping peppers by heat level, scaling a hot sauce recipe, and figuring out how much to dry or dilute, ChiliHeat pairs free hands-on calculators with practical guides and a richly illustrated museum of the world’s chili peppers. Grow it, ferment it, sauce it.
Chili & Hot Sauce Calculators
Free tools for growing, fermenting, drying, and cooking with chili peppers — Scoville blend calculator, ferment brine ratio calculator, chili substitution calculator, heat-scaling recipe calculator, pepper drying calculator, and a how-many-peppers dilution calculator.
Scoville Blend Calculator
Estimate the blended Scoville Heat Units of a chili mash made from more than one pepper, weighted by how much of each you use.
Ferment Brine Ratio Calculator
Work out exactly how much salt to dissolve into a given amount of water for a lacto-fermented chili mash.
Chili Substitution Calculator
Swap peppers by Scoville rating and get an adjusted amount that keeps a dish's heat roughly the same.
Hot Sauce Heat-Scaling Calculator
Solve for the exact pepper mass needed to bring a batch to a target Scoville level.
Pepper Drying Weight Calculator
Estimate how much a batch of chilies will weigh once dried, from fresh weight and moisture percentages.
How Many Peppers Calculator
Find how many whole peppers to blend into a dip or marinade to hit a target heat level.
The Chili Pepper Museum
Wander an immersive museum of the chili world — the peppers grown across every continent, the hot sauces and condiments built from them, the festivals and culture that celebrate them, and the plants and cultivation behind every pod, each in its own gallery. Every entry, image, and fact is drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
Tour the museum →From the Journal
Guides on the Scoville scale, fermenting hot sauce at home, pepper varieties, drying and storing a harvest, building a recipe from scratch, bottling safely, and the plant science behind chili heat.
Understanding the Scoville Scale: How Chili Heat Gets Measured
The Scoville scale is the standard way chili heat gets ranked, but it started as a subjective taste test long before modern chemistry took over. Here's how it actually works.
A Beginner's Guide to Fermenting Hot Sauce at Home
Fermenting chilies before you blend them into hot sauce builds a depth of tang and complexity that vinegar alone can't match. Here's how the process actually works, step by step.
Ten Chili Peppers Every Home Cook Should Know
From mild poblanos to face-melting superhots, these ten peppers cover the range most home cooks actually reach for — what they taste like, how hot they run, and what to do with them.
How to Dry and Store Chili Peppers for Year-Round Cooking
Drying is the oldest way to keep a chili harvest usable long after the growing season ends. Here's how the different drying methods work and how to store the results so they last.
Building a Hot Sauce Recipe From Scratch: Balancing Heat, Acid, and Flavor
A good hot sauce is more than just chilies and vinegar — it's a balance of heat, acidity, salt, and sweetness. Here's a framework for building your own recipe rather than following someone else's.
Bottling Homemade Hot Sauce: pH, Shelf Life, and Storage Basics
Getting a finished hot sauce into a bottle safely comes down to a few basic food-science principles — acidity, cleanliness, and storage. Here's what to know before you fill your first jar.
Keep Learning
Plain-language explainers on chili peppers, hot sauce, and the culture built around them — origins and cultivation, sauces and condiments, festivals and folklore, and the plant science of capsaicin — everything you need to go deeper.
Visit the Learn hub →