Dark red harissa paste in a stone mortar beside strings of sun-dried red chilies, garlic cloves and small piles of coriander and caraway seed on a clay-colored table

Harissa: The Complete Guide

September 30, 2026

Harissa is a paste of sun-dried red chili, garlic, coriander and salt, and in Tunisia it is part of household provisions and daily cooking. In 2022 UNESCO inscribed the knowledge and practice of making it on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. From that recipe the word has travelled onto jars made in Tunisia, the United States and Britain, some close to the original and some built for other jobs. The ingredient list is where they part ways.

What harissa is

The UNESCO inscription reads like a recipe. Chili peppers are dried in the sun, split, stemmed and seeded, then washed, ground and seasoned with salt, garlic and coriander, using a pestle and mortar or a hand-cranked meat mincer, and the paste is stored in glass or pottery for later use. The file describes harissa as an integral part of household provisions and of daily cooking in Tunisian society, usually made by women in a family or neighborhood setting. The peppers are grown to an agrarian calendar that includes periods considered unlucky for sowing, and growing knowledge passes through farming communities and agronomy schools.

What UNESCO inscribed is a practice, not a product. No jar is certified by the inscription, and a label that prints the word UNESCO is referring to the heritage, not to an inspection of its contents.

Harissa is also not chili crisp, which is aromatics fried in oil and has its own chili crisp guide.

The pepper

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, which sells the seed, calls the Baklouti the traditional pepper of Tunisia, and the Tunisian producer Les Moulins Mahjoub calls it the key ingredient of harissa. Baker Creek rates it at roughly 1,000 to 5,000 Scoville heat units and calls it mild to moderate. That number is a range for a reason. New Mexico State University, which recommends measuring heat by liquid chromatography, notes that growing conditions move pungency: a mild cultivar under stress in the field becomes hotter, and a hot cultivar in optimal conditions becomes only moderately hot. The same variety can run hotter or milder depending on how it was grown.

The chilies are seeded and then mixed with garlic, spice and salt, and each of the three commercial jars below adds oil. A spoonful of paste therefore carries less pepper than a spoonful of pepper, and Baker Creek notes that Baklouti tends to get milder with cooking. The Scoville table in the hot sauce guide is the scale to read that number against.

The styles, read from the label

The baseline is four things: dried chili, garlic, coriander, salt. Commercial harissa starts there and adds, and the ingredient list shows what was added. Under American rules, ingredients are listed in descending order of predominance by weight, and the European rule is the same. The first two ingredients on a harissa label therefore say most of what there is to know about it.

Label	First ingredient	Fat	Acid	Also in the list
UNESCO baseline (Tunisia)	Sun-dried chili	None specified	None specified	Garlic, coriander, salt
Les Moulins Mahjoub Traditional Harissa (Tunisia)	Sun-dried Baklouti chili	Extra virgin olive oil	None listed	Dried garlic, caraway, salt, coriander
New York Shuk Signature Harissa (USA)	Dried chili peppers	Sunflower oil	Lemon juice, second	Garlic, coriander seed, cumin, salt
Belazu Rose Harissa (UK)	Rehydrated paprika and red chilli peppers	Rapeseed oil, sunflower oil	Lemon juice, citric acid	Garlic, salt, chilli, mixed spices, rose petals, rose flavouring, paprika extract

The Tunisian jar from Les Moulins Mahjoub, a producer based in Tebourba, Tunisia, stays closest to the baseline and adds extra virgin olive oil and caraway; the Les Moulins Mahjoub producer guide tells the producer's story. The New York Shuk jar, made in the United States, puts lemon juice second on its list and adds cumin and sunflower oil. The Belazu paste is a British rose harissa, paprika-led, with rose petals and rose flavouring.

None of these is the wrong harissa. They are different foods for different jobs, and the difference shows in the ingredient list rather than the name on the front.

Read from the first two ingredients, the three jars sort into working styles.

Working style	First two ingredients	Good first uses
Dried-chili paste in olive oil	Sun-dried chili, olive oil	The spoon at the table, a swirl into yogurt, couscous broth, stews
Lemon-led dried-chili jar	Dried chili, lemon juice	Eggs, mayonnaise, roasted vegetables, grilled chicken
Rose or paprika paste	Paprika and chili, seed oil	Rubs and dressings where a floral note is wanted

Reading a percentage

When a harissa label prints a pepper percentage, European law may be the reason: the EU food information regulation requires the quantity of an ingredient to be declared when it appears in the name of the food, is usually associated with that name by consumers, or is emphasized on the label. American ingredient-labeling rules do not generally require a percentage for a product like this, so a percentage on a jar made for the American market may be voluntary.

Where the number is printed, net weight times the percentage gives grams of pepper. A 100 gram jar at 80 percent would hold 80 grams. Where a paste carries oil, the net weight includes the oil, so two jars of the same weight can hold different amounts of chili. The olive oil buying guide explains what extra virgin means when it appears on an ingredient line.

The quality label and the marks

Tunisia has an official quality label for harissa. According to the Tunisian news site Kapitalis, Tunisia's Ministry of Industry launched the Food Quality Label Tunisia to protect Tunisian harissa from imitations on international markets. The label certifies Tunisian origin, the traditional recipe, traceability and the quality and freshness of the ingredients, and certified producers submit to internal and external inspections. In 2021 INNORPI, Tunisia's national standards and industrial property institute, which certifies products against the harissa label, became the first certification body in Tunisia accredited under ISO 17065, according to Kapitalis. The label's name is the thing to look for on a Tunisian tin, tube or jar.

Other marks mean less than they suggest, or something different. USDA Organic is a real rule: a product must contain at least 95 percent organic ingredients to be labeled organic. Product of Tunisia is a customs statement about where the goods were made or last substantially transformed. Tunisian-style, North African and similar words are style descriptions rather than certified terms, and mild, medium and hot are the maker's own description.

Storing harissa safely

Unopened, a commercial jar keeps to the producer's date in a cool, dark cupboard, the same rule the pantry storage guide applies to every sealed jar. Once opened, follow the storage instructions on the jar.

Homemade harissa made with fresh garlic and oil is garlic in oil, and University of Georgia Extension guidance warns that garlic and herbs in oil can carry the spores of the bacterium that causes botulism unless the mixture is acidified or kept cold.

Harissa	Where	How long	Basis
Unopened commercial jar, tin or tube	Cool, dark cupboard	To the producer's date	The producer's printed date
Opened commercial jar	As the label directs	As the label directs	The producer's instructions
Homemade with fresh garlic and oil, not acidified	Refrigerator	Four days, then freeze or discard	University of Georgia Extension guidance for garlic and herbs in oil

Under that guidance, unacidified garlic and herbs in oil must be refrigerated and used within four days, or frozen. Acid is the way around the limit: the same guidance describes a University of Idaho method that acidifies garlic and herbs to pH 4.2 or lower before they go into oil. Without that procedure and a way to check the pH, four days and the freezer is the rule. Freezing is simple. Spoon the paste into an ice-cube tray, freeze, then bag the cubes.

How to tell it has gone off

Visible mold on the surface or around the rim means the jar goes. The USDA's guidance is that in soft, moist foods mold threads can run below the surface and may carry toxins, so a moldy paste is discarded whole rather than scraped. Discard any jar that smells off or shows bubbles.

Harissa and health

On chili, one large study is a 2015 cohort of just under half a million Chinese adults published in the BMJ. People who ate spicy food one or two days a week had a 10 percent lower relative risk of death over the follow-up than those who ate it less than once a week, and those who ate it six or seven days a week had a 14 percent lower relative risk. The study was observational, and the authors said further research was needed before the link could be called causal. On the old worry about ulcers, a 2006 review in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition concluded that capsaicin is not the cause of ulcer formation and called it a "benefactor."

On salt, the FDA sets the Daily Value for sodium at less than 2,300 milligrams and treats 5 percent of the Daily Value per serving as low and 20 percent as high. Read the panel on the jar against those numbers. The realistic serving is a teaspoon stirred into a pot for four, and at that dose harissa is a seasoning.

Cooking with harissa

Bloom it first. Warm a spoonful in the oil before the onions go in, the way the guide to blooming spices in oil describes for spices, so the paste cooks into the fat before the rest of the dish follows. From there:

Eggs. A spoon in the tomato base of shakshuka, as in the shakshuka with matbucha recipe, or folded into soft scrambled eggs.
Chickpeas and lentils. Stirred into a pot of either, which the chickpeas and lentils guide covers. A spoon on the hummus from the hummus from dried chickpeas recipe works the same way.
Vegetables. Tossed with carrots, squash or cauliflower before roasting, as in the harissa roasted vegetables recipe.
Fish and meat. Loosened with olive oil and lemon as a marinade for lamb, chicken or firm white fish.
Cold sauces. Stirred into yogurt, mayonnaise or a vinaigrette, a teaspoon at a time.
Couscous. Dissolved into the broth, or served alongside for each person to add.

For a first homemade batch, the harissa recipe to learn first works within the four-day rule above. The Morocco pantry guide places harissa beside chermoula and matbucha.

The Les Moulins Mahjoub jar (shop Les Moulins Mahjoub Traditional Harissa) is the dried-chili paste in olive oil described above, and the New York Shuk jar (shop New York Shuk Signature Harissa) is the lemon-led one. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.