Why did my chili oil flakes split in two layers? I recently made chili oil at home for the first time, it is delicious and works great. I simply infused canola oil with some spices and then poured it on chili flakes mixed with a bit of black vinegar. However, when I look at pictures of homemade chili oils, I noticed mine is a bit different.

Most chili flakes sunk at the bottom, but there's also a layer that stayed nearly floating at the top. Nothing but oil in-between those two layers. Whenever I use it, I have to mix it with a spoon first, which gets it looking exactly like what you'd expect, but slowly goes back into layers.

Is this normal behavior for homemade chili oil? If not, what can be done to prevent it?

My few theories as to why that is are:


I haven't used enough chili flakes for the amount of oil (though I did research these amounts first)
Some of the chili flakes burnt when I poured the oil while others didn't
Cheap chili flakes are cheap


Finally an update:
I've had the same thing happen. My suspicion is that the flakes on top had residual moisture which puffed them up during cooking, or alternatively that other gases were produced by pyrolysis and similarly trapped. Either way, a quick Google image search suggests that this happens fairly often.

Chili oil has to be mixed before use in any case, so I wouldn't worry about it. But if you were particularly unhappy with the look, you could try cooking the chili oil at a lower temperature, or pre-drying the chili flakes in the oven (a few hours at around 120&deg;C should do it).