Hot peppers are often used as a spice to enhance various foods. You can easily find things like burgers topped with jalapenos or even habaneros. But are there cultures which regularly eat those types of hot peppers all by themselves?
Here in the US, the hottest pepper people eat straight is probably something like a pepperoncini, which is pretty mild. That’s not too surprising, since we don’t often use hot peppers in our cuisine. However, other cultures do have very hot peppers as a main staple in their cooking. Are they so used to the heat that they can snack on those hot peppers raw?
Do you remember the “Every body needs milk” ads from the early 1970s? Various celebrities spoke of their experience with milk; one was singer Vikki Carr, of Mexican ancestry. She said she was trained to eat those peppers in bites! (She and her husband had a spicy Mexican dinner; she ate quite a few of those peppers. She suddenly turned to kiss him right on the lips and he reacted from the peppers! “Honey, that’s HOT!” He was going for the milk.)
Despite the efforts of an assortment of fools, Texas is still part of the US.
I often get served a grilled serrano or jalapeño with Tex-Mex, which I often eat by itself. Even in elementary school, we would eat the pickled jalapeños alone if they were served separately.
So yeah, Mexico certainly does it. And cuisine-wise, Texas is kinda like the Wisconsin of Mexico.
Do you mean a whole raw jalapeno is eaten on its own? I have seen raw jalapenos served with dishes, but typically they’re chopped up and served as a garnish to something else (like a salad or on a taco). Are there places which serve whole raw jalapenos with the meal and people eat them as if it was a carrot or something?
Sometimes I’ll see a grilled pepper served with a meal, but it’s typically covered in oil. The oil helps to reduce the heat a bit.
I’m wondering if there’s a culture which might have a basket of raw chiles on the counter and it would not be at all unusual or surprising to see someone pick one up and eat it, much like we would eat an apple.
I grew up in New Mexico and I knew a guy who would eat NM green chiles raw, but he was an exception. Even though he ate them raw, it wasn’t part of the NM culture to do so.
I regularly consume raw jalapenos and serranos with most of my meat dish meals. I also grill large japs and sometimes stuff them with cream cheese as an appetizer when doing cookouts. At certain restaurants I go to, fried japs are offered as a side, in addition to the relish usually brought out as a sort of condiment.
I’m a white, middle aged, middle class, English speaking American.
I have some silly friends that will do this “macho” thing of biting into the hottest peppers they can find. I don’t do that. While I like the heat of many peppers, I enjoy the flavor, too. Other hotter peppers I use in cooking and salsas, as noted by the OP.
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I met several people in India who would snack on hot peppers raw. People would sometimes have a little bowl of peppers that could be thrown into food or just eaten on their own like candy.
These are the small green or red peppers of which there are many varieties, but all are fairly hot (around the same heat level as the typical Thai chili peppers).
My husband spoke of something similar when visiting Kathmandu, Nepal: a bowl of green peppers served as a side dish to the meal. He described them as “Russian roulette peppers” in that 90% of them were perfectly mild, but the remaining 10% would melt your face off.
Bah! If that was true they wouldn’t have let those bastards at Texas A&M turn the noble and delicious Jalapeno into the giant,bland, waxy piece of crap they are today.
My father, who grew up in Mexico, told me about a visit his family made to a paternal cousin. For dinner, all the family had to offer were onions and grilled peppers (unaware of what type) with tortillas.
