I like, actually love, to cook. I’m italian and like gto cook italian foods, stuff involving pasta, cheeses, meats and tomato sauces. I’d realy like to get a uniform red pepper type spice through-out a sauce without having the hot-spots that crushed red pepper creates.
So, what do I do? If I heat up some olive oil (which I do anyway to start) and add the crushed red pepper…will it melt away, giving a uniform spicynessto my oil ?
thanksDepends what you mean by ‘red pepper’.
If you mean chilli, then the best approach is to infuse olive oil. Get a few juicy hot chillis, gently score the skins, then put into a fresh bottle of top-notch olvie oil. And leave it for several months. Then you can use it wherever you’d use oil, just with chilli flavour and heat throughout.
If ‘red pepper’ actually means bell peppers (as it does in the UK), just chop it fine, fry in olive oil for twenty minutes, then strain it finely and you’ve got a pepper oil.
You want to grind it up using a mortar and pestle.
Or you can use cayenne powder.
Oh, and the infusion works equally well in vodka 
Use whole peppers and remove them before serving.
Can’t you get hot, finely minced chilli in a jar? That’s the standard thing over here. No need to actually buy and chop your own chillis.
If you saute the pepper in oil, it should give up most of its capsaicin to the oil, but not all.
If you have a coffee grinder or spice mill, you can grind the red pepper into a fine powder and add that. I make my own hot chili powder that way. It’s a lot cheaper than buying pre-ground cayenne pepper.
If you have the larger hot peppers, you can blister their skin under a grill and then remove the skin (paper towels help, rub the colled blistered skin with a paper towel). Remove the seeds, and then you can mush up the flesh using a pestle and mortar or liquidiser. Also for a uniform strong heat I like to use Dave’s Insanity sauce, it is really strong so a drop or two is usual sufficient, but it doesn’t ad any other flavour (like vinegar or garlic) than chilli so is good for cooking where tabasco would spoil the sauce.
Or you could just buy some chili oil at your local supermarket, in the Asian section.
But watch out that some of that asian chilli oil uses sesame oil as a base and might add a flavor you don’t want.
Ahhhh…I remember my college experiences with ‘spicy vodka’, as we called it. Rather than pay big bucks for a fancy flavored vodka, we bought the 1.75 L of cheap vodka ($12) and put in a crap-load of copped up chilis, all different sorts. We let it sit for a couple months, and from then on we always started a night of drinking with a shot of spicy vodka.
It was hot, but the heat didn’t laste a long time, because capsacian (sp?), the stuff that makes chilis hot, is alcohol soluble, so it didn’t really stick to your tongue the way it would if you just ate a chili straight up.
There is a risk of botulism from doing that.
Making flavored oils is perfectly safe, but as wolfman pointed out, keeping it for several months is considered risky. I’d use it within several weeks.
Garlic infused oils seem to be the main botulism culprit.
I make a hot pepper oil by stir-frying dried Chinese hot peppers and oil, in a wok at a high temperature. You could add some salt to it and keep it in the fridge and it should be safe for quite awhile that way.
from the World Health Organization page on botulinium:
So using a homemade infused oil in a stir fry is safe unless it’s gone obviously bad, but making a salad dressing with it may not be safe if the oil wasn’t prepared correctly.
Doesn’t “crushed red pepper” generally mean red pepper flakes? That’s what I have always used in such recipes.
In which case, no, the pepper doesn’t melt away anymore than ground black pepper does, sautéing it in oil distributes the heat and flavor evenly. Good stuff.
Williams Sonoma has a product called “Chili Rojo” that we like alot…
It’s chili peppers in virgin olive oil with some garlic and black peppercorns. Even has a pasta recipe on the label…so it looks like it is actually made for italian style cooking.
Nice thing is, you can sample it at almost any Williams Sonoma store, if you have one near you. The stuff has a nice chili flavor, but really doesn’t have much heat so it won’t overpower most dishes.