Name: Chili Vinegar
Ingredients: 50 small ripe cayenne peppers, chopped finely; strong vinegar

Why it works: Pepper and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,814 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chili Vinegar

Ingredients

50 small ripe cayenne peppers, chopped finely
strong vinegar

Directions

Combine chopped cayenne peppers with strong vinegar in a jar.
Let the mixture sit for 2 weeks.
Strain the mixture and bottle the vinegar.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,814 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cayenne peppers: Supply the heat, pepper flavor, and color that the vinegar draws out over time.
Strong vinegar: Acts as the solvent that extracts capsaicin and flavor from the peppers and preserves the mixture.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.