The Chilli King is a UK-based website dedicated to growing and cooking with chilli peppers. It was started in early 2006 and is written from 20 years of hands-on growing experience in the UK climate. From the first seeds sown in a propagator in January through to the final harvest and preservation at the end of the season.
Who Is Behind This Site
I’m a UK-based chilli head / grower who started this site in the early 2006. At the time I was teaching myself HTML and had developed a slightly obsessive interest in growing chillies at home. My then girlfriend (now wife) bought me the domain name www.thechilliking.com to give both hobbies somewhere to go. Twenty years later the site is still going strong.
My chilli growing setup has changed significantly over the years. I started with a few pots on a south-facing windowsill. These days I typically grow 15-20 varieties per season across a greenhouse and container setup, including everything from compact windowsill varieties like Demon Red and Apache through to slow-maturing superhots like habanero, scotch bonnet and naga. I’ve grown well over 50 different varieties since I started and kept several plants through multiple overwintering cycles. In fact my oldest overwintered plant ran to five seasons before retirement.
I’m not a horticulturalist by profession or a chef by training. What I am is someone who has made most of the mistakes it’s possible to make when growing chillies in the UK. Sowing too late, using the wrong compost, letting aphid infestations get out of hand, watching plants drop every flower for weeks i’ve done them all and eventually learned from all of them. The content on this site comes from that accumulated experience as well as some of the great feedback and insights from readers comments and emails.
On the cooking side, I’ve been making the recipes on this site for years. The famous chilli chutney recipe has been in continuous production since around 2009. I own a clay tandoor oven and make the lamb kofta and tandoori chicken regularly enough that the tandoor technique is now genuinely second nature. The fermentation recipes are a more recent obsession — travelling through Southeast Asia introduced me to the Thai street food tradition of serving fresh fermented chilli sauce alongside everything, which I’ve been trying to replicate at home ever since.
What This Site Covers
The Chilli King covers three main areas:
Growing chillies in the UK
This is the original focus of the site and where the deepest and most popular content lives. The UK climate presents specific challenges that chilli growers in warmer countries don’t face. In our climate we have shorter seasons, lower light levels in winter and greater temperature variability. Everything here is written for UK conditions specifically based on our personal experience. The guides cover the full growing cycle from choosing and germinating seeds in January through to overwintering plants in October. We also cover common problems such as yellow leaves, aphids, flower drop where we set out how to diagnose and resolve the problems, again based on what we have learnt from our mistakes in the past!
Chilli information
On the site we have a large array of informational pages such as the Chilli Heat Guide covering the Scoville scale and where different varieties sit, the health benefits of chillies, the history and types of capsicum species. Background material that helps growers and cooks understand what they’re working with.
Chilli Based Recipes
Over the years we have documented some of our favourite recipes we make at home. They are primarily focused on what to do with a chilli harvest. We cover various preserving methods including chutney, jelly, oil, flakes, fermented sauce and freezing. We also have a large database of regular cooking recipes, many Indian recipes developed from years of cooking with a tandoor and a particular obsession with Indian food. A pizza section that has been refined over 15 years. The recipes are written for UK kitchens and UK ingredients.
How We Approach Content
Everything on this site is written from direct personal experience. If we recommend a product it’s because it’s something we’ve used ourselves. The propagators, grow lights, Chilli Focus feed and kitchen equipment in the buying guides are things that have actually been in our greenhouse or kitchen. The recipes have been made repeatedly, tweaked upon and tested, often for years, before they appeared here.
We don’t take payments to recommend products. The site carries AdSense advertising and uses Amazon affiliate links to help pay for site maintenance and hosting costs. When you buy something through a link on this site we earn a small commission at no cost to you. This is disclosed clearly in our affiliate disclosure.
If something doesn’t work as expected, a technique that’s less reliable than claimed, a product that underperforms, we say so. The propagator guide is honest about the temperature limitations of the mid-range models. The grow lights guide is honest about which claims manufacturers make that don’t hold up in practice. We’d rather be accurate than promotional.
The Site Since 2006
For the record, here is a brief history for the site:
2006. The domain is registered. The first version of the site is built in raw HTML by someone who didn’t really know HTML.
2007-2010. The site grows slowly. The first chilli chutney recipe is published. The aphids article goes up after a particularly bad infestation of a habanero plant.
2010-2015. WordPress migration. Content expands significantly. The growing guide, pests and diseases section and the first Indian recipes are published.
2015-2020. Steady growth. The tandoor oven arrives. The Indian recipe section expands significantly.
2020-2026. Major content expansion. Comprehensive rewrites of the growing guides, new recipe content including the fermented chilli sauce guide, significant technical improvements to the site. The site now covers over 400 topics related to growing and cooking with chillies.
Get in Touch
Questions, corrections, suggestions and recipe results are all welcome. The comments sections on each post are read and responded to. We have over 1,500 reader comments across the site going back to 2009 and the conversations in them are genuinely one of the most useful resources on the site. If something in a guide is wrong or could be improved, please say so.
For direct contact use the contact form here.