Teja Chilli Explained: Where It Grows, Why It Burns, How to Use It
What the Teja chilli is, why Khammam is tied to it, what the Scoville numbers do and do not tell you, and how to cook with it.
A chilli with two names
Say "Teja" to a home cook and you get a knowing wince. Say it to someone in the trade and you may also hear S17, which is the same chilli under its other name. It is usually described as a sub-variety of the Guntur family, and physically it is an unimpressive thing: thin, light, easy to underestimate. Hold a handful and it weighs almost nothing. That lightness is part of why buyers like it, since a small quantity brings a lot of heat into a pot. It is also why the first spoon of Teja powder ever measured by a confident cook tends to be remembered at family gatherings for some years.
Khammam, mostly
The place to know is Khammam, a district in Telangana that is reported as the largest producer of the variety. Its agricultural market is one of the biggest chilli markets in the state. A lot of what grows there leaves the country, with China, Bangladesh and other South Asian buyers named in reports, much of it moving through Chennai port. Some of that demand has little to do with anyone's dinner. Oleoresin, a concentrated chilli extract used by food processors, is a major reason for the export trade. As of the 2023 reports I could find, Teja did not hold a GI tag, so the name is not legally tied to one district the way some Indian foods are. Those same reports also said Teja farmers were taking heavy losses at the time, which is worth remembering the next time someone calls chilli an easy crop.
What this says about our pack
All of that describes the variety as a crop. It does not describe where any particular Sunder pack came from, and I am not going to imply otherwise by standing a paragraph about Khammam next to a product photo. What the Sunder label says is simple. Red Chilli Powder has one ingredient, and the ingredient is Teja chillies.
The number everybody wants
Published Scoville figures for Teja commonly run from about 60,000 to 110,000 units. Seller listings wander above and below that, some of them quite far. I would read any single figure the way you read a promise from a man selling mangoes at a railway station. The range is a fair description of the chilli as a class. It is not a measurement of what is in your dabba. We have no lab figure to publish for our powder here, so I will not hand you one. The scale itself began in 1912 with human tasters diluting an extract until they stopped feeling anything, and it is only as tidy as that sounds. Modern labs use HPLC to measure the compounds directly and then convert the result.
So why does it burn?
Capsaicin. It sits in large quantities in the placenta, the pale tissue the seeds hang from. The seeds make none of their own, despite what your uncle has told you for thirty years, though they sit close enough to pick up some of the blame. On your tongue, capsaicin binds to a receptor on nerve endings called TRPV1. The same receptor responds to actual heat, which is the entire joke. David Julius used capsaicin to find it and shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine partly for that work. So when you say the dal is hot and someone at the table points out that it has been sitting on the counter for an hour, you are both correct, and your nerves cannot tell which of you to side with.
Fine or coarse
Sunder sells Teja in two textures on the Mirch shelf. Red Chilli Powder is fine, so it disperses through a gravy and the heat arrives evenly, without warning. Kuti Teja Mirch Powder is coarsely pounded, which the catalogue suggests for pickles and chutneys, and it is the one in our lehsun mirch chutney, where garlic and lemon give it something to argue with. Coarse flakes leave pockets. One mouthful is pleasant and the next one makes you reconsider your plans for the afternoon. There is also Express Teja Mirch Powder in the value range, with sachets down to ₹5.
How much to start with
This is my opinion and not a laboratory's: for a sabzi or dal feeding four, begin at a quarter teaspoon of fine Teja powder if you have not used it before. Taste after it has simmered a few minutes, then decide. You can always add a little more, and getting it back out is a much longer conversation. If you want red colour in a gravy, do not chase it with more Teja. That job belongs to Kashmiri Mirchi, and we have a short piece on choosing between the two.
Two things nobody tells you
Wash your hands with soap after handling it, particularly before you touch your eyes or anything you care about. And open the pack away from the stove, since steam dulls ground spice and a sneeze over a boiling pot helps nobody. A 100g pack of Red Chilli Powder is ₹56 and a sachet is ₹10. Start with the sachet. Nobody needs to meet Teja by the kilo.