Chili Paste, 5 Types From Gochujang to Harissa

What is chili paste?

When you buy chili paste, you get chiles ground to a thick, spoonable purée and kept with something that holds them: salt and garlic, spices, oil, or a slow ferment. UNESCO's file on Tunisian harissa describes it plainly as a seasoning made with chilli pepper paste¹, and the other pastes here follow the same idea with their own chile and their own keeper.

What sets a paste apart is the keeper, not the chile: a ferment, a spice mix or a plain simmer decides how it tastes and how long it lasts. Harissa families keep the finished paste in glass or clay jars for later use¹, while a plain New Mexico purée goes in your fridge and has to be used or frozen within 3 days².

Chili crisp sits at the oily end of this family and has a page of its own. Where a paste thins out into something you shake from a bottle, it becomes one of the hot sauce styles.

What goes into each type of chili paste?

The map above gives you five kitchens. Here is what each jar you pick up holds, in the words of the sources behind it:

• Gochujang (Korea). Gochu, the Korean chili, as powder, mixed with meju powder made from fermented soybean, glutinous rice and a large amount of salt, then fermented³.
• Harissa (Tunisia). Chiles dried in the sun, split, stalked and seeded, then washed, ground and seasoned with salt, garlic and coriander¹.
• Ají pastes (Peru). Mostly ají amarillo, rocoto and ají panca: 98 % of processed ají products use those three native chiles⁴.
• Red chile purée (New Mexico). Dried red pods, soaked and blended with hot water, then simmered for 10 minutes².
• Chipotles in adobo (Mexico). Smoke-dried red jalapeños canned in adobo, which NMSU defines as a tomato-based sauce⁵.

A worked example: one traditional gochujang recipe by weight

A 2024 study lists the recipe of a traditional gochujang from Cheongju, in percent by weight³. Scaled to a 1 kg batch, you would weigh out the following:

Look at your first row: chile makes up less than half of the jar. A second traditional sample from Hongcheon in the same study pushes chile powder to 50 % and adds 20 % starch syrup and 5 % soy sauce³, so two family jars of gochujang can differ a lot in heat and sweetness. The study does not give a fermentation time, so we leave the ferment itself to the gochujang page.

How is gochujang different from harissa?

Gochujang is a fermented grain-and-soybean paste with chile in it; harissa is a chile paste with seasoning in it. Put them side by side and you see every row differ.

So you can swap them only loosely. Gochujang has a sweet side along with its heat⁶, and harissa has no rice or soybean in it at all¹. Swap one for the other and your dish gains or loses the rice, the soybean and the garlic along with the chile, so taste as you go.

How do you make a basic chile paste at home?

Soak dried pods, blend them, cook the purée briefly, then season it. NMSU's red chile method covers the base, and the harissa file shows one classic way to season it¹².

1. 1

   Stem, seed and soak

   Pull the stems and seeds from dried red pods, wash them, then cover with boiling water for 30 minutes.²

2. 2

   Blend

   Blend the soft pods with just enough fresh hot water for a thick, smooth purée.²

3. 3

   Simmer

   Simmer the purée for 10 minutes before you use or store it.²

4. 4

   Season

   For a harissa-style paste, work in salt, garlic and coriander.¹

For quantities, plan on 12 to 14 large dried pods for about 1 pint of purée². That fills one pint jar. The dried chiles page walks through the soak in full, including which pods to skip.

The Tunisian way runs longer, because the drying happens at home too. UNESCO's file sets out the order, and each step below comes from it:

UNESCO adds that women usually make it together, in a festive family or neighbourhood setting¹. You can read that as a practical tip too: a big batch goes faster with four hands on the seeding.

Chili Pepper Madness, a recipe site with its own channel, shows one cook making a homemade harissa paste in this video, so you can see the texture you are aiming for, though it is one cook's recipe, not the UNESCO method above.

Play video: The Versatile Chili Paste YOU NEED | Homemade Harissa Paste from North Africa 7:24

The Versatile Chili Paste YOU NEED | Homemade Harissa Paste from North Africa

From Chili Pepper Madness

VideoPlays from YouTube when you press play.Watch on YouTube

1 source

Which chili paste should you pick, and when?

Pick by what the dish needs besides heat. Each paste brings a second thing, and that second thing decides the match.

• You want sweetness and body in a glaze or stew. Gochujang, with its rice and fermented soybean⁶.
• You want garlic and spice up front. Harissa, seasoned with garlic and coriander¹.
• You want smoke. Chipotles in adobo; the chile itself went through smoke before canning⁵.
• You want plain chile, nothing else. A home red chile purée from New Mexico pods, which you season yourself².
• You cook Peruvian dishes. An ají paste, and read the label: amarillo, rocoto and panca are three different peppers⁴.

What goes wrong with a homemade paste?

Mostly time and temperature in your kitchen. Run through these before you scale up your batch.

A paste you want to keep for months on a shelf is a different project. Fermenting changes the safety rules, and the fermented hot sauce guide covers salt and time for a ferment you make at home.

How hot is chili paste?

As hot as the chile in it, thinned by whatever else you find in the jar. None of the sources behind this page give a Scoville figure for any paste.

So read the chile name on the ingredient list and look up that pepper. Two Peruvian pastes, one of ají amarillo and one of rocoto, can look alike in the jar and still carry the heat of two different peppers. The gochujang recipe above shows the other half of the answer: when chile makes up 40 % of a jar³, the rice, soybean and salt in the other 60 % soften every spoonful.

Your best test is a small one. Stir a little into the finished sauce, taste, then add more; you can always add paste, and you cannot take it back out.

How much of the chile trade is paste?

In Peru, almost half of what you see on supermarket shelves. A Bioversity International market study of Lima supermarkets found sauces and pastes at 46 % of chile sales, close behind fresh ajíes⁴.

Among processed ají products, 98 % use the three most common native chiles, ají amarillo, rocoto and panca, and fewer than five companies dominate the national market⁴.