I have a lot of ground chili spices and bought another one this past weekend. I feel like I have more than what’s reasonable, so I took stock of what I have to try and make a plan.

Ground Chilies

These are the ground chilies I have on hand:

• sweet paprika
• smoked paprika
• Sichuan chili flakes
• Thai chili powder
• ancho chili powder
• crushed red pepper
• gochugaru

Ground Chili Adjacents

These are spice blends that largely play a similar role as ground chilies:

• berbere
• shichimi togarashi
• chili powder (USian “chili powder” usually refers to a blend that includes cumin, oregano, garlic powder, and other spices. It believe it’s named because it’s used to make chili)
• Cajun seasoning

Whole Dried Chilies

Additionally I have some whole dried chilies

• chiles de arbol
• california chiles
• Chinese chili peppers (chao tian jiao)

A Strategy

I'm not worried about the whole chilies: when you need a whole chili, a ground one won’t do. And I’m not really worried about the blends either. Ideally I’ll make these blends as needed from other ingredients I have on hand and can make in quantities as needed. The chili powder and cajun seasoning are my own blends.

That leaves the ground chilies. Looking at the list, I have ones that range from mild to spicy and non-smokey to smokey. Categorizing them could look like this:

	Mild	Spicy
Non-smoky	sweet paprika	Sichuan chili flakes Thai chili powder crushed red pepper gochugaru
Smoky	smoked paprika ancho chili powder

Unsurprisingly, the non-smoky spicy category is the largest bunch, and also contains a range of spiciness. I think I could get down to one option per category and make do. Is crushed red pepper going to yield the same flavor as gochugaru? No. Will it be close enough and save me space in my pantry? Probably.

Additionally, consolidating spices means I’ll go through the ones I have faster, meaning that it will be fresher. I’ll have to decide which non-smoky spicy chili I’d like to keep in stock (likely Sichuan chili flakes or gochugaru), but otherwise sweet paprika and ancho feel like good choices. And that leaves an opening for a smoky spicy option.

The big caveat here is that as I cook through a cookbook, I want to cook the recipes as written. Cooking through The Wok is why I have gochugaru, shichimi togarashi, and Chinese chili peppers anyways.

Aside from that exception, I have a semblance of plan moving forward to contain my chili spices.