Pantry · Chiles

Ñora

The little round dried pepper that makes a Spanish sofrito taste Spanish: sweet, earthy, and barely hot.

Capsicum annuum — a small, round, sun-dried Spanish pepper · Also called ñora, nyora, pimiento seco · From The Spanish Levant, especially Murcia and Alicante

Small round dried ñora peppers, rust-red, in a clay bowl.

The journey

Ñoras are sun-dried on the plant until they look like wrinkled coins. Romesco, some rices, and a Murcian sofrito assume them. They are not cayenne. They are not paprika already ground — though they are a cousin of that powder.

Five recipes in the Spanish volume name them. Choricero is the northern cousin still waiting. This is the Mediterranean one.

Public-domain 1828 plate of peppers — kin to the Spanish ñora. — M. E. Descourtilz, Flore médicale des Antilles (1828) · Public domain. Source

In the kitchen

Soak, scrape the flesh from the skin, and add the pulp to a sofrito or a sauce. The skin is tough. The flesh is the point.

If you cannot find ñoras, a little sweet pimentón plus a soaked dried red pepper is the weekday stand-in. Say so.

Healers and the table

Spanish home kitchens treated these sweet dried peppers as food, not as a dare. The color is the appetite.

Ñora in a sofrito is supper. It is not medical advice.

Traditional uses are part of the story of this spice. They are not medical advice.

Used in these ComidaTime kitchens

Find Ñora on Amazon