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I remember in high school, we read a short story about a man challenged to eat a hot pepper. The descriptions of the agony he went through were so vivid, many of us squirmed in our seats as we read.
Fast forward to today, and I’m a big fan of hotness in food. However, the trick is to make it deliciously hot, not hot for heat’s sake. Anyone can dump a jar of cayenne into a pot and make whatever’s cooking hot.
BTW, South Carolina is home to a record setting pepper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Reaper
However, there are new challengers which have probably surpassed it enough to be classified as WMD . . .
I mentioned it and its rating at the end of the second paragraph. I’m always looking out for the Carolinas. 😉
Language warning:
Yep, thought I’d add a little background on the Reaper and its competitors. The link to the Reaper guy’s company:
https://puckerbuttpeppercompany.com/
Order a bottle of Reaper Sauce if you dare!
As a fan of Caribbean cooking, I’ll put in a word here for the Scotch Bonnet pepper, so named because of it’s alleged resemblance to a tam-o-shanter hat. It’s a relative of the habanero with a Scoville rating of 80,000-400,000. It’s sweeter, frequently used in jerk preparations, and is distinguishable from a number of peppers in actually having taste (sweet) apart from heat. It’s also been around for a good long while in nature and the art of cooking, and is distinguishable from peppers such as the Reaper and other recent concoctions that are simply bred to be hot in some type of arms race.
As Stad said above, WMD.
And he’s right. I’m not impressed. By the peppers, not Stad.
Puckerbutt is a great name. That’s what peppers that are super hot do the next day….
I like that they sell seeds, but some of those plants won’t produce well in the more northern states. Like AOC complained of people not growing jicama in their community garden plots, you can plant them but they’ll just sit there. Some of it is day length, some of it is soil. If your soil pH is too low (i.e., if you can grow blueberries and rhododendrons sprout like weeds), you won’t get much. You can allegedly buy authentic Tabasco seeds, but good luck growing them.
A good variety of serrano peppers for northern climates is called Hot Rod.
And this carries over into Texas A&M Corps of Cadets. I ran across this guys blog a while ago and there was a challenge to the commandant for a chili pepper eating contest. Hilarious.
@arahant I like spicy food, but I’m probably a wuss compared to you and freely admit it. (I also like having a lining on my stomach.)
Mild Mexicans?
Not any more. This story is from more than a quarter of a century ago. Then I went and met this girl who didn’t like spice at all. Since I cook for both of us, it meant taking it easy on spices. I am no longer inured to the heat.
Never knew any of those.
Yo tambien.
I must say, though, Tabasco did a pretty good job with their Habanero sauce. It’s pretty good. Not as good as the Chipotle sauce, but not at all bad.
Never actually tried it. I suspect it came out after I had already experienced as much Habanero as I ever wanted since the sourness was inherent within the pepper as with the Jalapeño. Of course, they might be mellowing out the sourness in those oaken barrels.
The Indian Army makes pepper spray from ghost peppers, so it has been weaponized.
Just eating them is weaponized enough.
I like spicy – I’ve always said if it doesn’t raise a bead of sweat on your forehead, it’s not worth eating. I don’t think I’d be terribly interested in my hair sweating, however.
My rule of thumb has always been – if it is so hot you can’t taste anything else, it’s too hot.
And you never, never, never want to get the oil from one on a contact lens you are wearing. Ask someone to drop an anvil on your foot first. It will hurt much, much less.
Dunno. Sounds plenty tough to me.
We just did a round as you described when someone came back from Trinidad & Tobago with some Bertie’s Scorpion Pepper Sauce. I like hot and spicy, but this was insane. I get the maxed out “5 star” heat level at my Thai place, and they know to go ahead and just bring the spice wheel to table so I can kick it up. Bertie’s was a tough job. It was hot enough that the retired, battle-hardened Command Sergeant Major that sits next to me actually muttered, “Man, Ima tell you what.”
I also always get a kick out of some of the hotter offerings from Belizean Marie Sharpe’s sauces, which has on the back label, “Warning: Extremely Hot! Do not use this sauce to play jokes on the old or the sick.”
Agreed. I made a raspberry-habanero sauce once, and I seeded and sliced the peppers by hand. While doing so, my nose was itching, so i rubbed it with the backside of my hand.
I had to take a shower immediately to get my eyes to stop watering. Even though I hadn’t come close to touching them.
They add sugar and a whole lot of fruit. Banana, tamarind, mango, and a few others I forget.
That hurts just thinking about it.
Always a sign of something.
I like that. Thanks for sharing it.
No wonder it’s measured at only about 7,000 Scovilles. 😉
Aw gee I did that in college, but it wasn’t a super hot pepper. I used to have a townie drinking pal in college. There was a hangout that had decent pizza, cheap beer, a jukebox, the usual. If you ordered a pizza other students would decend on you like a swarm, asking to share. Matthew and I always said, sure, we’ll share! “What’s on your pizza?” they asked. Our reply, “Double Hot peppers.” They all walked sadly away. We ordered that deliberately to keep the moochers away. It was probably only the Hungarian Hot Wax peppers that you get anywhere. I had to keep soaking and cleaning the contact lenses for days before I could use them again.
Happened to a friend of mine (don’t know what kind of pepper). Her boyfriend called the local Mexican restaurant to get advice – they recommended rinsing her eye out with lots and lots of milk.
It worked.
I don’t know much about peppers, but I love your description of everyone trying to out-man each other.
I have always loved spicey food (probably thanks to my mother’s boring cooking – anything with flavor and a bit of kick was sought after and appreciated). But when I was pregnant, I was off the hook. I remember takeout meals my husband would bring home for me and my lips would still be on fire the next morning. Which probably accounts for my four kids and their taste buds and appreciation for HOT.
My daughter roasts the peppers, makes the salsa and she and her brother all sit around in 100-degree+ weather commenting that it’s “not as hot as last time, but okay”. While trying to not obviously cough or choke or down too many beers.
I still don’t understand how our son doesn’t have black hair and an olive complexion. The ONLY thing my wife would eat when she was pregnant with him was Mexican.
Yeah. Cold water just makes the fires angrier.
LOTS of Mexican food for me, although I remember an Indian and Thai phase as well. When I was pregnant with son #1 my work/travel partner was Indian and I ate Indian food all over the country. So much so when I went to the doctor as I hadn’t felt right in a few weeks, and he told me I was pregnant, my response was “are you sure it wasn’t that Indian food in Fresno?”