What Is Harissa? Red vs Green, Explained

Harissa turns up on three of our dishes across two addresses, and in two colours. On Hamilton Road the Lebanese charcoal chicken comes with a green harissa. On Haji Lane, at Li’l Habibi, the red harissa goes on the Şiş Tawook and on a beef chuck skewer. We have mentioned the word in a dozen posts and explained it in none, so this is that post: what harissa actually is, where it comes from, why it is not Lebanese even though our chicken is, and what the green one is doing next to the red.

What harissa is

Harissa is a Tunisian chilli paste. The classic version is built on dried red chillies — in Tunisia often the Baklouti pepper grown around Nabeul and Gabès — pounded with garlic and seasoned with spices, most characteristically caraway and coriander seed, sometimes cumin, with olive oil to carry the oil-soluble flavours and to keep it. It is a paste, not a sauce: thick enough to hold its shape on a spoon, and meant to be used in small amounts.

The name tells you how it was made. It comes from the Arabic root harasa, “to pound, to break into pieces” — the chillies were pounded, traditionally with a pestle and mortar.

Why a Tunisian paste is on a Lebanese chicken

This is worth being straight about, because our menu invites the question. Harissa is North African — Tunisian first, and adopted across Algeria, Libya and Morocco — not Levantine. The Lebanese part of our Lebanese charcoal chicken is the bird and the toum, the whipped garlic sauce that goes with it; we have written about why that chicken has a cult following separately. The harissa is a borrowing, the same way the yuzu in the toum is a borrowing. Our glossary of Lebanese food files it with the other borrowed words on the card, and our chicken post calls it one of several words on the menu that are not from the country the dish is named after. That is exactly right.

We borrow it because a charcoal chicken needs something with heat and edge against the fat and the smoke, and harissa does that in a way that is savoury rather than just hot. The caraway and coriander give it a warm, slightly citrus spice that plain chilli does not have.

How hot is it, really?

Less than people expect. The Baklouti chillies of Nabeul and Gabès are relatively mild — around 4,000 to 5,000 on the Scoville scale, according to the figures Wikipedia gives — warm rather than fierce. Commercial harissa varies a great deal, and a jar from a supermarket can be much hotter or much blander than a Tunisian home version. The honest answer for any given harissa is: taste a little first.

The paste Tunisia put on the UNESCO list

In 2022, UNESCO inscribed “Harissa, knowledge, skills and culinary and social practices” on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, on Tunisia’s nomination. What was inscribed is not a recipe but a practice. UNESCO’s own description sets it out: the chillies are dried in the sun, split, stalked and deseeded, then washed, ground and seasoned with salt, garlic and coriander, using a pestle and mortar or a hand-cranked meat mincer, and stored in glass or pottery. It is usually made by women, in a family or neighbourhood gathering, and the skills pass down by watching.

Tunisia is also the world’s largest exporter of prepared harissa, and the town of Nabeul, on the Cap Bon peninsula where the peppers grow, holds an annual harissa festival, usually in October at the end of the Baklouti harvest. None of which is on our menu, but all of which is why we will not pretend the paste is ours.

Red and green: what the difference actually is

Red harissa is the classic — dried red chillies, pounded, spiced. Green harissa is a variation built on fresh green chillies and a lot of fresh herbs instead of dried red peppers, so it lands sharper, brighter and more vegetal, closer in spirit to a herb sauce than to a paste. There is no single canonical green harissa, and recipes differ widely in which herbs they use.

We are going to be careful here, because our menus print the word and not the recipe. The Hamilton Road card says green harissa and the Li’l Habibi card says red harissa, and neither lists what goes into ours. So we will not tell you which herbs are in the green, or which chillies are in the red. What we can say is why each sits where it does.

Where each one goes, and why

Green, on Hamilton Road. The menu line under Biggies reads: LEBANESE CHARCOAL CHICKEN (45MINS OF LOVING) — spatchcocked, green harissa, garlic-yuzu toum, sidewinder chips. The green one goes on a whole bird that has already taken on a lot of smoke and rendered fat, and what it needs is freshness and acid rather than more depth. The toum brings the garlic and the fat; the green harissa brings the heat and the herbs. We have written about why we grill that chicken over charcoal in full.

Red, on Haji Lane. Li’l Habibi’s menu prints the prices, so here they are as printed: Şiş Tawook, 29 — charcoal chicken thigh, red harissa, konbu fries, and among the kushiyaki, Beef Chuck, 14 each — red harissa, ramen chilli. The red goes on skewered meat that is smaller and cooks faster, where there is less time for smoke to build depth — so the deeper, dried-chilli paste does some of that work. On the beef chuck it is layered with ramen chilli oil, two chilli traditions on one stick, which we pulled apart in our skewer guide. (Li’l Habibi’s menu adds 10% service charge and 9% GST to those prices; Hamilton Road’s does not print prices at all.)

Using harissa at home

Loosen it. A spoonful of red harissa stirred into olive oil and lemon juice becomes a marinade or a dressing for roast vegetables.
Into yoghurt. Swirled through thick yoghurt or labne, it is a dip in under a minute.
In a stew, early. In Tunisia it goes into meat and fish stews, couscous and lablabi, the chickpea soup. Added early, it cooks into the base; added at the end, it stays sharp.
Keep it under oil. Once a jar is open, a thin layer of oil on top keeps the paste from drying out in the fridge.

The one thing not to do is treat it like ketchup. It is concentrated, it is salty, and it is meant to season, not to smother.

Tasting both

You cannot taste the two side by side at one address: the green is on Hamilton Road and the red is on Haji Lane. If you want both in one week, the chicken is dinner at Habibi-san (Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, 29 Hamilton Road), and the skewers are at Li’l Habibi (55 Haji Lane, Tuesday to Sunday from 5.30pm). The full card is on our menu page. Neither venue is halal: we serve pork and alcohol at both.

For the rest of the sauces and pastes on the card, our guide to Japanese food in Singapore links every ingredient explainer we have written, including tahini.

Sources: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, “Harissa, knowledge, skills and culinary and social practices” (inscribed 2022, 17.COM); Wikipedia, “Harissa” (etymology, Baklouti peppers and Scoville range, Nabeul festival, export position); our own Hamilton Road food menu and Li’l Habibi menu, both unchanged since October 2025 and checked 29 September 2026.