A small ceramic bowl of glossy dark-red Aleppo pepper flakes beside sliced cucumbers, a round of goat cheese dusted with red flakes, and halved peaches with tomato wedges on a pale stone surface

Villa Jerada and the Aleppo Pepper That Moved to Turkey

September 29, 2026

Villa Jerada is a Moroccan and Levantine pantry company in the Seattle area, founded by Mehdi Boujrada, who grew up in Casablanca. It sells Moroccan cooking oils, harissa, tahini and spices, and its chile is Aleppo pepper: red flakes, splashed with oil and salt as they dry. The pepper is named for a Syrian city, and an importer told National Geographic in 2016 that many of its growers had moved across the border into Turkey during the war. Villa Jerada's flakes are made from Turkish chile. The jar is Villa Jerada Aleppo chile pepper flakes, 60 grams (shop Villa Jerada Aleppo chile pepper flakes).

A house in Casablanca, a warehouse in Tukwila

Boujrada told Washington Local in 2023 that he grew up by the beach in Casablanca. His family, the Boujradas, named their house Villa Jerada. He started the company to share a piece of his culture with the community that welcomed him when he came to the United States. A grocer's maker profile says he began by importing cold-pressed cooking and dipping oils from Morocco. The range later grew into spices, condiments, rubs, syrups and spreads. The company's homepage tells of a tuna sandwich Boujrada ate constantly growing up in Casablanca, after soccer and surfing, and calls the brand a nod to the past with its feet in the present.

The company packs and keeps its office in a warehouse in Tukwila, south of Seattle. Boujrada's word for the model is "glocal": ingredients sourced abroad, transformed in Washington State. Asked for his favorite product, he named the harissa, because it carries the specifics of Moroccan flavor.

In 2022 Seattle Met reported that Boujrada was marking the company's tenth anniversary with a summer series of street-food popups at local restaurants. The magazine wrote that chefs across the country turn to Villa Jerada for harissa, Aleppo and tahini.

What Aleppo pepper is

Aleppo pepper takes its name from Aleppo in northern Syria. National Geographic described it in 2014 as a dried chile that is crushed but not ground, sold with most of the seeds sifted out, "cherry-red, mellow and medium-hot, lightly salty and oily with a whiff of wine and smoke." According to a retail listing for the jar, the flakes get their moist texture from being splashed with oil and salt during drying. The listing calls the flavor mildly spicy and pungent, with a little sweetness.

Why the chile now comes from Turkey

The Syrian civil war broke the supply. In 2014 National Geographic quoted Ayr Muir, founder of the restaurant chain Clover Food Lab, who wrote that Clover could no longer get the Aleppo pepper it had loved for years. Chef Ana Sortun was using a pepper grown in the neighboring Turkish province of Kahramanmaraş. Spice merchant Tom Erd told the magazine that half the region producing the pepper, the Syrian half, either could not grow it or could not move it to sell.

In a 2016 follow-up in National Geographic, a Brooklyn importer said that many Syrian growers had moved their operations north into Turkey. The retail listing for Villa Jerada's jar gives Turkey as the origin of the raw chile.

How Maraş pepper is grown and dried

The pepper of Kahramanmaraş, the Turkish province National Geographic named in 2014, is well documented by Turkish authorities. Maraş Biberi has been a registered Turkish designation of origin since 8 January 2003, registration number 43, held by the Kahramanmaraş Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes it as an annual plant with conical, thin-fleshed fruit suited to drying, used for ground pepper, flakes and isot. It is sown in February and March, and the red, ripe fruit is picked from August in two or three passes, depending on the season. Each fruit is 60 to 115 millimeters long and weighs 8 to 14 grams. A decare, one tenth of a hectare, yields 2 to 3 tonnes of fresh pepper.

There are three ways to dry it. Whole peppers laid on tarps in the sun take about 8 to 12 days. Washed peppers put through a slicer and spread on concrete or mesh take 1 to 3 days. Fan ovens take 3 to 4 hours, or 1 to 1.5 hours with microwave assist. In drying, the pepper loses 75 to 80 percent of its fresh weight as water.

From field to jar, worked out

The ministry's figures convert to the scale of the jar with one multiplication: keep 20 to 25 percent of the fresh weight.

Measure	Figure	Working
One fresh Maraş pepper	8 to 14 g	Ministry figure
Same pepper, dried	1.6 to 3.5 g	8 × 0.20 and 14 × 0.25
Pods per 60 g of dried pepper	About 17 to 38	60 ÷ 3.5 and 60 ÷ 1.6
Fresh pepper per 60 g dried	240 to 300 g	60 ÷ 0.25 and 60 ÷ 0.20
Dried pepper per decare	400 to 750 kg	2,000 × 0.20 and 3,000 × 0.25
60 g jars' worth per decare	About 6,700 to 12,500	400,000 ÷ 60 and 750,000 ÷ 60

Three caveats apply. These are the ministry's figures for Maraş pepper. The listing says only that the raw chile is Turkish, not which variety or province, so the figures illustrate the scale rather than describe this jar. The flakes also carry oil and salt, so less than 60 grams of the jar is pepper, which lowers the pod count. Aleppo pepper is traditionally sold with most of the seeds sifted out, as National Geographic described it in 2014, which would raise it. The two corrections pull against each other, so the table gives an order of magnitude rather than a count. At the ministry's figures, 60 grams of dried pepper works out to roughly a quarter kilo of fresh red peppers, a few dozen pods.

Using the jar

Villa Jerada's own recipes include a cucumber salad with Aleppo, a round of goat cheese with Aleppo and Urfa biber, and a salad of grilled peaches and tomatoes with Aleppo. In all three the chile goes in uncooked, as a finishing seasoning or in the dressing. The flakes are salted as they dry, so it pays to taste a dish before salting it. Warming the flakes in oil at the start of cooking is the other route, covered in the guide to toasting spices and blooming them in oil.

For more of the Moroccan pantry, the Morocco in the pantry guide covers chermoula, matbucha and preserved lemon, and the harissa guide covers the paste. Chile reaches the kitchen in three forms: fermented and bottled in the hot sauce guide, fried in oil with garlic in the chili crisp guide, and dried and crushed in a jar like this one. The single-origin spices guide covers spices beyond chile.