The Long Journey of the Aleppo Pepper

Early in the 7-year-old Syrian civil war, U.S. imports of Syria’s signature dried, ground Aleppo chiles dropped drastically.

The spice-trading city of the same name, where the fresh pepper was traditionally grown and processed, has been devastated in the fighting, which has destroyed lives and livelihoods. The conflict has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria, and displaced millions of people both inside and outside the country.

Aleppo peppers were among $550 million worth of crops destroyed in and around the city each year between 2011 and 2016, according to a 2017 assessment by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. These crop losses come on top of a U.S. State Department ban on direct Syrian imports, in place since 2011.

The resulting Aleppo pepper shortage in the United States came just as the salty-sweet, mildly hot chile was becoming well-known among U.S. chefs, restaurateurs, cookbook authors and spice merchants.

“Those of us who were fortunate to know Aleppo pepper from Syria know how delicious and fragrant and tasty it was,” said Lior Lev Sercarz, the owner of La Boîte, an apothecarylike spice emporium on Manhattan’s West Side.

The pepper’s unique flavor has much to do with the way it is cured, said Marlene Matar, the author of “The Aleppo Cookbook.”

“The preparation of Aleppo ground pepper is a long process,” Matar wrote by email from her home in Beirut, describing one traditional way to produce the spice. “It is not washed, but cleaned with pieces of white cloth then cut lengthwise on one side only and the seeds are removed. Then the pepper is placed on the rooftop to dry in the sun.” While large Syrian food companies, such as Durra, rely on several thousand families to produce and sell Aleppo pepper, processing the spice is traditionally a small-scale affair, with family members and neighbors gathering to prepare the peppers.

When partly dried, the naturally oily peppers are coarsely ground and mixed with a bit of salt and olive oil, then left to dry completely. This produces ruby-red, slightly salty flakes that keep well in the freezer thanks to the oil and are distinctively Syrian, Matar wrote.

“In Arabic, the Aleppo red pepper is called ‘Baladi,’ meaning it belongs to my country,” she wrote.

Now, Sercarz and other spice importers and vendors are finding ways to get genuine Aleppo pepper back in stock. Some secure them through third-party Syrian connections; others, from suppliers in southern Turkey who grow the peppers from seeds obtained through seed banks or from fleeing refugees who carried the coveted seeds across the border.

“I used to get a lot of Aleppo pepper from Syria, but with the war it stopped,” said Nidal Hajomar, the Syria-born owner of Aleppo’s Kitchen, a family-run restaurant in Anaheim, California.

Though he still cannot get true Syrian Aleppo pepper, Hajomar remains in contact with his wife’s parents, who live and shop in Khalidiyah, in northwestern Aleppo, where they are able to at least buy enough fresh peppers to process their own supply of the spice.

Some U.S. growers and food vendors are sidestepping the challenges of importing Aleppo peppers altogether by producing them domestically, in commercial nurseries in Virginia, on the plains of the Midwest, and in sunny Southern California.

“I just like the pepper’s earthiness, together with its background sweetness that’s like a mild, tomatoey flavor,” said Chad Lowcock, the owner of Race City Sauce Works in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 2013, Lowcock introduced a chutneylike sauce called Roasted Aleppo and Cayenne Shatta, a medium-heat combination of cayenne, fresh garlic, dried Aleppo pepper flakes from Turkey and Greece rehydrated in red wine, and roasted fresh Aleppos he buys locally.

Such uses veer from the spice’s traditional role in Levantine cuisine, often as a finishing touch on plates of hummus, sizzling spears of kebabs or blended with red bell peppers in muhammara.

In recent years, the Aleppo pepper’s innate versatility has broadened its appeal among chefs.

“It is, of course, spicy, but it’s also a little citrusy and fruity, with a bit of sweetness, so it’s interesting for sauces and very good for marinated fish and raw fish preparations,” said Eric Ripert, the chef and an owner of Le Bernardin in Manhattan. He relies on La Boîte for his supply of Aleppo pepper, selectively chosen by Sercarz from plants grown in Turkey from Syrian seeds.

Aleppo pepper’s unusual flavor profile distinguishes it from its close cousins in the chile family: Urfa, Marash and Antep, named for the pepper-producing towns of Sanliurfa, Kahramanmaras and Gaziantep, just across the Syrian border in southern Turkey, where many Syrian refugees are living.

The Antep comes closest in flavor, but lacks the Aleppo’s subtle heat. The Marash’s smoky intensity and the dark purple Urfa’s raisiny (some say tobaccolike) aroma and sharper bite make them interesting alternatives, but not substitutes. It took Peter Bahlawanian, the owner of Spice Station in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles, several years to track down a reliable importer after the start of the Syrian conflict. He said vendors came into his shop trying to pass off other ground chiles as true Aleppos.

But there was no fooling the spice merchant, who grew up in a house with two Armenian grandmothers who did the cooking, which included liberal doses of Aleppo pepper from a bag in the cupboard.

“When the war was booming and demand was high, there was a lot of fake Aleppo pepper or ‘Aleppo-style’ chile going around,” said Bahlawanian, who in 2014 finally found a Syrian source for real Aleppo pepper, grown and processed in Aleppo and its surrounding farms. His connection — which he prefers not to name — purchases the ground spice in 10- to 50-pound bags directly from farmers and ships it out of Lebanon.

Ron Sahadi, an owner of the venerable Middle Eastern food market Sahadi’s, in Brooklyn, also had trouble obtaining Aleppo pepper during the early years of the war. Like Sercarz, he now gets the chile from Turkey, where it is processed from plants grown from cherished Syrian seeds.

“It is Aleppo,” Sahadi said. “It has the same taste and consistency.”

Other food vendors, like Lowcock, have turned to buying and producing the cultivar domestically.

Chef Jeremiah Langhorne, of the Dabney restaurant in Washington, buys fresh Aleppo peppers from Virginia greenhouses, then dries and grinds them himself. In Lakeside, California, James Duffy of Refining Fire Chiles has been cultivating and selling Aleppo peppers since 2012 from seeds he obtained in a roundabout way — from an Italian horticulturist who got them from a U.S. Department of Agriculture seed bank. The Aleppo pepper’s journey to the Western Hemisphere is something of a repatriation. Chiles originated in South America and were among the New World crops, like potatoes and tomatoes, that Christopher Columbus and other early explorers introduced to Europe in the 15th century. Chiles soon spread across Europe to Syria and Turkey, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

Because chiles have what the French call terroir — flavors particular to their environments — Aleppo chiles grown in the United States are bound to taste somewhat different from those grown in Syria or southern Turkey, said Paul Bosland, director of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University.

Still, Timothy Bader of Volcanic Peppers, in the Omaha, Nebraska, suburb of Bellevue, has been successfully growing Aleppos on 2 acres of land there since 2013, drying and processing them himself into “Aleppo Pepper Dust,” which is more powdery than traditional Aleppo pepper spice.

One of the company’s best-selling products, said Bader, is his “Aleppo Pepper Sauce,” a mildly spicy hot sauce, imbued with black pepper, fresh onion, garlic and lemon. Having never heard of Aleppo peppers before Duffy introduced him to them, Bader also felt unrestrained by convention when concocting his Spicy Curry Sauce, a blend of fiery yellow ghost and smoky aji panca peppers, tempered by the Aleppo’s relative civility.

Despite these experiments and tweaks on the part of chefs and devotees of Aleppo pepper, the spice’s stature remains distinctively Syrian, and Aleppan. For a city with a rich culinary heritage, situated along what was once the Silk Road, the local chile remains a point of pride.

“They may use it throughout Syria, like in Damascus and other places,” Hajomar said, “but they make it just in Aleppo.”

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