Aleppo Pepper

Aleppo Pepper, also known as Halaby pepper, is a Syrian Capsicum annuum associated with the city of Aleppo and widely grown in northern Syria and southern Turkey. It is a long-established regional cooking pepper used mainly dried rather than fresh, and its traditional processed form is made by ripening the pods fully, then semi-drying, deseeding, crushing or grinding them into flakes. In Turkey those flakes are known as pul biber, and in Armenian usage they are known as Halebi bibar.

The plant is upright and productive, usually around 70.0 cm to 1.0 m tall, though some seed listings and growers report plants reaching about 1.2 m. Pods are pendant, medium-fleshed, usually about 7.0 to 15.5 cm long and about 3.0 to 4.0 cm wide, with a blunt, often three-lobed tip that gives the fruit a somewhat pimento-like shape rather than a narrow cayenne form. The pods ripen from green to bright red, then deepen toward burgundy at full maturity.

Its flavour profile is one of the reasons it became so widely valued. Multiple sources describe it as fruity, tangy, earthy, slightly smoky, and raisin-like, often with cumin-like undertones and a mild oily richness once processed. That distinctive balance made it a staple seasoning in Syrian, Turkish, Armenian, Middle Eastern, and broader Mediterranean cooking, especially for kebabs, salads, dips, meze, stews, and spice blends.

Its history is tied to the movement of New World chillies into the Ottoman world after the Columbian exchange, followed by local adaptation in the Aleppo region into the pepper now known by the city's name. It was already a longstanding regional pepper well before its broader popularity in the United States, where it began attracting wider attention after Paula Wolfert's 1994 book The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean.

A real conflict in the source record is heat. Some sources place it at about 10,000 SHU, while others give a wider range of 10,000 to 23,000 SHU. Another inconsistency is modern market origin: the pepper is historically Syrian and named for Aleppo, but much commercial production shifted into southern Turkey after the Syrian civil war damaged farms, reduced exports, and disrupted supply from Aleppo itself.