The Best Homemade Chili Powder Recipe

Homemade Chili Powder is so easy!

The second you start making your chili powder will be the second you stop buying store-bought chili powder. This homemade chili powder recipe can be used in a variety of dishes. You can use this in anything from your homemade taco seasoning, homemade chili seasoning mix, or dry rub, or you can add it directly to a delicious pot of chili. We use this a lot to make our very own chipotles in adobo sauce!

Not all Chilis are made equal!

If you haven’t figured it out from the name chilis are the main ingredient in this recipe. Some people will only use ancho chilis in their chili powder but we like to use a variety to make sure that our signature blend has a lot of different flavors. One of the secret ingredients in this spice is Mexican oregano. This type of oregano has extra lemon notes in it that add to the flavor of this mix. If you have a local Spanish food market it should be easy to find this and your dried chili peppers. If you do not there are some great options on Amazon! We will link the ones we used below! If you still cannot find dried chilis please feel free to use acho chili powder in replacement.

Don’t worry if you don’t have fresh chilis!

If you are lucky enough to procure fresh chilis you can use a dehydrator on them or just leave them out in direct sunlight until they are dried. You can then save that batch of chili for future use as well!

Feel the heat!

You can also choose the spice level of your chili powder. We are always into a spicy kick but we lean to more smokey flavors for pur pure chili powder. You can feel free to add some cayenne pepper to this mix to add a touch of heat. 

To be able to get a fine powder you can use a few tools which I will link below if you need to purchase one. We used an electric spice grinder that we also use as a coffee grinder when making espresso. This is small but makes grinding the chilis for this blend of spices quick. You can also choose to use a food processor. Just make sure that it is powerful enough to get a fine powder. You can then store this in a spice jar, an air-tight container, or a glass jar (our preference). Once everything is ground fine we use a small bowl to mix everything.

One thing that you will need for this is a dry skillet, preferably a cast iron. You will need to roast the dried chilis over medium heat until they start to dance or blister. This allows the oils to be released from the peppers and will give you a more flavorful mix.

Tools we used

• These are the various chili’s and Mexican oregano that we purchased for making your homemade spice blend. They are as fresh as you can get when it comes to dried chilis and they pack a ton of flavor.
• As always we love our Lodge cast iron skillet.
• We used our spice grinder as well as our Ninja food processor for this!

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