Understanding Harissa: A Comprehensive Guide

Even if you’ve been cooking for a long time, you may occasionally stumble upon an ingredient that you’ve never heard of before, especially if you’re cooking a recipe from a type of cuisine you don’t usually make. For example, if you don’t usually make pizza or pasta dough, you may have never heard of 00 flour. If you aren’t Jewish, you may wonder what the heck an etrog is.

Harissa is an ingredient commonly used in North African and Middle Eastern dishes, but it isn’t a super common ingredient outside of that. And that’s a shame because harissa is a tasty spice blend that you can use in all sorts of ways, from marinating meat to adding a richer, spicier kick to your ramen noodles.

Whether you ran across it in a recipe or on the shelf at the grocery store, harissa is a great addition to any pantry, even if you don’t usually cook North African or Middle Eastern cuisine. The best part is that harissa is incredibly easy to make, meaning you can tailor and tweak your recipe so it works perfectly for whatever dish you’re making.

Harissa is a spice blend that comes from North Africa, especially Tunisia. It’s made primarily from roasted red peppers, often Baklouti chili peppers, as well as other spices like paprika, garlic, and caraway. The blend is usually mixed with oil and lemon juice and used as a paste. It’s typically somewhat spicy, but spice levels can vary depending on the peppers used.

While harissa originated in Northwest Africa, it’s spread throughout the world, likely due to Spain’s occupation of the area in the 16th century. It’s most frequently used in North African and Middle Eastern dishes but is incredibly versatile. While often used to season dishes or spread over meat before cooking, many people use it as a dipping sauce for bread or mix it into plain rice or pasta.

The specific taste of harissa can vary, but it’s usually a mix of spicy, smokey, and sweet. It’s easy to make at home, so you can create your own blend if you want to fine-tune the taste. Otherwise, you can usually find harissa at the grocery store or in the grocery section of your local big-box retailer.

Harissa is extremely easy to make, which is why so many people choose to make it at home. You’ll start by drying and grinding chili peppers…or just buying them already ground. You’ll also add ingredients like garlic, caraway, salt, lemon juice, and olive oil. The amount of these varies depending on the flavor profile you’re after.

Our friends at Food Republic have a great homemade harissa recipe to use as a guideline. This recipe starts with toasting caraway seeds, coriander seeds, and cumin seeds in a dry saucepan, then grinding them with a mortar and pestle. Next, you’ll add these spices, as well as fresh red chilies, dried guajillo chilies, garlic cloves, cilantro leaves, salt, lemon juice, and olive oil to a food processor and puree. You want your mixture to be thick but not solid, and you can add a little more liquid if it seems too thick.

Harissa has a complex flavor, usually spicy and smokey, with hints of garlic and a bright tanginess that comes from the lemon juice. However, it’s important to note that there isn’t one set recipe for harissa. Even in its birthplace of North Africa, the taste can differ depending on what area you’re in.

One thing that can significantly impact the taste of harissa is the type of chili peppers you use. Chili peppers can vary quite a bit in their taste and heat. Baklouti peppers, which are the type commonly used in Tunisia, aren’t particularly hot, at about 1,000–5,000 Scoville Heat Units (for reference, the hottest pepper in the world, Pepper X comes in at nearly 2.7 million Scoville units). Guajillo chilis, commonly used in Mexican cuisine, rank a little higher at 2,500 to 5,000 SHU.

Additionally, the other spices you add to your harissa will impact the taste as well. For example, if you’re a lover of garlic- and who isn’t?- you can add more garlic to bring out that flavor. That’s one of the fun things about making your own harissa: you have the ability to tweak the recipe as you see fit and even adjust it depending on what you plan to use the harissa for.

Red curry paste and harissa paste have a lot in common. Both are pastes made from a blend of spices, and the core ingredient to both is chili peppers. Both also typically include garlic and coriander. Like harissa, the specific ingredients in curry paste will depend on the area the recipe is from.

Most curry pastes use a base of chilies, garlic, ginger, and onions, which leads to an earthy and savory flavor profile. However, depending on the region, curry paste may also have ingredients like turmeric, cardamom, tamarind, lemongrass, galangal, wild lime, star anise, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Curry paste is commonly used in Indian and Thai cuisine, as well as foods from Myanmar, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

While harissa doesn’t have a specific use case, curry paste is most commonly used to create curries. However, like harissa, curry paste can also be used in things like marinates, meat rubs, dipping sauces, or as a flavor enhancer.

Sriracha is a type of hot sauce that originated in Thailand. As with red curry paste, there are similarities between harissa and sriracha, but there are also significant differences as well.

Harissa and sriracha both use chili peppers and garlic. However, sriracha usually uses red jalapeño peppers. These are hotter than the peppers usually used in harissa, coming in between 2,500 and 8,000 SHU. Sriracha also includes distilled vinegar and sugar, which are typically absent in harissa. As a result, the sauce is usually spicier than harissa, with a tangy taste unique to vinegar.

Though harissa and sriracha are usually used in different types of cuisine- North African and Middle Eastern for harissa, South Asian for sriracha, their overall uses are very similar. Both are very versatile and can be used as dipping sauces or for seasoning dishes. However, you’re more likely to find sriracha being used as a condiment, the way hot sauce often is. Thanks to the vinegar, sriracha typically is not as thick as harrisa, either.

So, what happens if you have a recipe that calls for harissa but don’t have any in the house? Well, as we explained above, harissa is relatively easy to make, but of course, to make it, you need to have all the ingredients on hand. If you cook often, you probably have most of what you need to make harissa from scratch, but you may not have the specific types of peppers or something like caraway seeds at the ready.

In that case, if you don’t have the time to run to the store, you’ll need something to use as a substitute. The tricky thing is, harissa has a somewhat unique flavor that can be difficult to match. Hot sauce is often the best option if you can’t get your hands on harissa, as it has the spice. An option like sriracha, which has the garlic as well as a thicker texture, is often as close as you can get.

However, hot sauce usually doesn’t have the smokey flavor that so strongly defines harissa. You can also try blending smoked paprika with cayenne pepper to give you that smokey heat, and add a little garlic as well. You can even mix it with some lemon juice and olive oil to create a paste similar to what you would get with harissa.

As we’ve already mentioned, harissa is an incredibly versatile spice blend that can be used in many different ways. Some people use it as a dipping sauce for bread, similar to marinara, while others use it as a condiment, more like ketchup. Others use it as a seasoning or marinade for meats, and some add it to soups, stews, or casseroles. It can also be mixed with plain rice or pasta to add some extra flavor. When you consider it as both a spice and a condiment, the options are nearly endless.

Need some inspiration? We’ve got you covered. Check out how harissa adds a bold, smokey flavor to roasted veggies or how to use harissa to put a Mediterranean spin on a classic burger. Or try Bobby Flay’s go-to midnight snack, a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich seasoned with harissa. You can also use the spice paste to transform canned tomato soup or sweeten up your latkes.

Not everyone has the time or energy — or a food processor — to make harissa at home. And that’s totally fine because you can often find it at the grocery store. Typically, you can find harissa near the spices, the condiments, or with the sauces and marinades. Where you find it will partially depend on the store and partially depend on whether you’re looking for the paste, the dry seasoning, or the sauce.

For the most authentic harissa, look for North African or Middle Eastern grocers near you, as these stores typically cater to those who cook this type of cuisine frequently. However, if there aren’t any near you, Trader Joe’s sells a delicious-looking traditional Tunisian harissa paste, and so does H-E-B. Kroger has a dried harissa seasoning, which Publix also sells in addition to a harissa sauce. Note that smaller grocery stores or those in more rural areas may not carry harissa.

Big box stores often sell harissa in their grocery section. Target sells both harissa sauce and harissa dried spice, and Walmart sells harissa as a sauce and spice blend as well. Amazon sells a variety of options, including harissa paste, harissa sauce, and harissa seasoning. Even if you live somewhere where you can’t buy harissa right off the shelves, you should be able to order it and have it delivered to you.

Nutrition information for harissa can vary depending on whether you’re eating it as a paste, seasoning, or sauce, and what brand you choose. Since the paste form of harissa is the most common, we’ll take a look at the nutritional information for the Trader Joe’s harissa paste.

Harissa is typically pretty low in calories, fat, and carbs; the Trader Joe’s brand has 10 calories, 0.5 grams of fat, and one carb in 1 teaspoon of harissa paste. There’s no cholesterol or sugar either, but there also isn’t much in the way of vitamins and minerals, with no protein, vitamin D, or iron. However, harissa can be high in sodium, and the Trader Joe’s brand has 50 milligrams of sodium in 1 teaspoon, as well as 23 milligrams of potassium.

The Mina mild harissa sauce, available through a number of retailers, has 10 calories and 0.5 grams of fat in one tablespoon. It has no cholesterol, one carb, 65 milligrams of sodium, and 8% of your daily value of vitamin A. Considering that one tablespoon is equal to three teaspoons, the Mina harissa sauce is slightly healthier overall than the Trader Joe’s harissa paste.

As we’ve already mentioned, the flavor profile of harissa can vary depending on the region the recipe is from. However, in stores, you’ll typically find two types of harissa: mild or spicy. In general, the spicy varieties use more peppers with higher levels of capsaicin. Capsaicin is the chemical compound within chili peppers that makes them taste spicy. Different peppers have different amounts of capsaicin, which is what gives them their ranking on the Scoville Heat Scale.

The other way that harissa can be categorized is by its form: paste, sauce, or seasoning. The paste is thicker and more concentrated, while the sauce typically has more oil or even vinegar in it to thin it out. As a result, the paste will have a stronger taste, and you’ll also need to use less when cooking.

On the other hand, harissa seasoning is a dry blend of spices without any of the oil, vinegar, or lemon juice. It’s far more concentrated than the paste or the sauce, but often, you can mix it with oil to turn it into the paste or sauce form of the spice blend. Harissa paste and sauce are better for use as marinades, while the seasoning works best as a dry rub. All types of harissa can be used to add a little something extra to things like soups and sauces.

The best way to store harissa is going to depend on whether the harissa is a paste, sauce, or dry seasoning, as well as whether or not it’s been opened. After all, you generally don’t store an open jar of spaghetti sauce in the same place as your spices, right?

Both harissa paste and sauce can be kept in the cupboard before opening, but once they’ve been opened, you should refrigerate them. You basically treat them the same way you treat things like ketchup and hot sauce. Even if you close the lid tightly, leaving them at room temperature creates an environment where mold and bacteria can thrive and potentially make you sick.

Dry harissa seasoning should be stored the same way you store other spices for the longest-lasting flavor. Whether opened or not, try to keep it somewhere cool and dark, away from heat and light sources. This helps preserve the flavor. However, if you’ve gone ahead and mixed that dry seasoning with olive oil to create a paste or sauce, you’ll need to put it in an air-tight container and keep it in the fridge.