8 of the Best Countries for Spicy Food Around the World

The cuisine of mainland Africa’s westernmost country doesn’t play around with surface-level spice. Scotch bonnet peppers offer floral heat to pots of beans and stews, stuff their fiery flesh into fish, and form a litany of hot sauces. Many traditional dishes in Senegal start with nokoss, a paste of spicy peppers pounded together with herbs and alliums, which is used to marinate protein or as the base of a sauce. And if anything needs an extra kick, few tables lack for sosu kaani, the local hot sauce.

No taco, tamale, or torta could be considered complete without a sousing of salsa. From the most obscure takeout window to the fanciest restaurants, every table in Mexico comes set with multiple hot sauce options. Orange habanero salsa signals its ferocity in color. Flame-red salsa often hides the heat of serrano peppers, while the sharp rawness of green salsa enhances it. The only way to know the spice of any selection is to taste it. Even fruit and desserts get sprinkled or slathered with heat in Mexico, usually in the form of seasoning powder and sour chamoy sauce, and you can sample the hottest of the hot snacks on food tours across the country.

Colonization and forced migration patterns brought together the heat-heavy cuisines of South Asia, West Africa, and China on a small Caribbean island ideal for growing peppers. Roadside vendors sell cups of oysters drowned in a pepper and vinegar sauce; underripe fruit gets a dressing of chopped chiles and garlic to transform it into chow; and buljol, a salt-cod salad, takes its name from the French word for burned mouth—consider yourself warned. And few foods in Trinidad and Tobago make it off the plate without a streak of brightly colored Scotch bonnet pepper sauce, amped up with mustard for a multifaceted spice power.

Nearly everything in Nigeria has pepper, often Scotch bonnets. Peppers show up dried and mixed with ground peanuts and spices coating grilled skewered meats called suya or blended and fried as the base to ofada stew. And no matter the dish, in Nigeria, a sprinkling of extra peppers or a dribble of pepper sauce provides the finishing touch. There's even a saying in the Yoruba language of the country’s southwest: “A soul that does not eat pepper is a powerless soul.”

Thai cuisine prizes the balance of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and spicy flavors, but that balance often leans heavily toward the sharp bite of chile peppers. This is due to the bird’s eye chile, used so often in Thailand that it often goes by the name Thai chile. Consider a food tour in a city such as Bangkok to discover the gentle burn of coconut milk curries that builds over the course of a bowl, or dive into the merciless sour crunch of green papaya salad, which provides no relief from the raw burn of the chiles in the dressing.

Curries in Sri Lanka turn it up a notch in every fashion: brighter colors, bolder flavors, more spices, and maximum heat. Combinations of fresh, dried, and ground chiles, as well as peppercorns, weave into the deep red Jaffna crab curry, murky black pork curry, and tamarind-based fish curry, while condiments add to the spice factor. Even the most basic meal here comes with many spicy toppers, such as lunu miris, made from pounded red onions and ground chile peppers; pol sambol, made with scraped coconut and chiles; and seeni sambol, which is sweet and spicy caramelized onions.

The vastness of Chinese cooking means that it really deserves at least three spots on this list. In Sichuan, the eponymous peppercorns numb and tingle tastebuds in combination with other peppers. Hunan cuisine goes all-in on fresh peppers, frying them in oil to amp up the dry heat. Meanwhile, the mark of Guizhou food comes from the sourness that accentuates and balances the spice, with its heavy use of pickled vegetables and a pounded paste of ciba chiles.

Related: A Sichuan Food Lovers Guide to Chengdu

Food in Malaysia draws on dishes from Malay, Chinese, and Indian cuisines, combining three spicy traditions into a country where seeking out the spiciest dishes is practically a national hobby. Red chiles mixed with garlic and ginger start nearly every rempah, the spicy paste used as a base for most dishes, including favorites beef rendang, chicken curry, and laksa. And the national dish, nasi lemak, centers on coconut rice but is served with sambal, or hot sauce.