Piri-piri

Piri-piri is the small, erect, finger-sized fruit of Capsicum frutescens, the African bird's eye selection, two to four centimetres long, ripening from green to lacquered red and drying to deep maroon. Heat sits between 50,000 and 175,000 Scoville heat units, a band that reads as sharp and immediate rather than the slow-building heat of chinense relatives, because frutescens carries capsaicin and nordihydrocapsaicin with a leaner volatile load: less fruity ester, more grassy pyrazine and a dry pepper edge. The name is a Swahili doublet, pili pili meaning pepper-pepper, transliterated into Portuguese as piri-piri and English as peri-peri -- same species, different spelling. Three origins matter: Mozambique, where coastal populations from Inhambane to Zambezia are the reference; Zimbabwe and Malawi, where African Bird's Eye AAA is grown for export; and Portugal proper, where piri-piri returned with the seventeenth-century trade and became the backbone of frango no churrasco. Expect a fresh red finger or a dried whole pod, never the homogenised paste supermarkets sell under the same name.