Chocolate and a burned mouth

Factual Questions
1

A few days ago I burned the roof of my mouth with some fresh from the oven pizza*.

Most of the discomfort this has since caused me has been a result of food pushing up against, jabbing, or scraping against the injured area. Basically, if nothing’s touching it it doesn’t really hurt. If something does touch it, the pain is that of a tender area being abused.

O.K., just discovered a new, different kind of pain: Chocolate! I just had a piece of chocolate and managed to not jab myself in the injured area with it. I chewed it in the back of my mouth away from the injury. But as the chocolate mixed with my saliva it started to intensely burn and irritate the injured site. I mean a lot! And it took about a minute for the pain to go away.

So, what’s going on here? What makes chocolate such an intense irritant in this situation?

*N.B. maybe the pizza crust isn’t too hot, maybe the cheese isn’t too hot, but that doesn’t mean you can bite into it without the scalding boiling sauce squirting out and burning like a sonofabitch!
:eek:

2

The sugar maybe? What do other (non chocolate) sweet foods do to it? What about other sugar free chocolate foods?

3

Sugar is great for when I burn my tounge on soup, maybe the sugar?

4

Maybe. I, otherwise, don’t eat too much sugar but I’m sure I’ve had some in the past couple of day (I’ll have to think on that- I might not have).

This “chocolate burn” definitely was intense though. If I did have some other sugar in the past few days it didn’t have nearly as intense an effect.

5

I had a similar experience with a sore tooth. Cold water right on the tooth hurt, but not bad. One of those mini chocolate bars had me on the verge of tears. The only other sugar I had was in coffee or in oatmeal with no real pain.

6

Well, as an incipient ulcer sufferer, I can tell you that chocolate is on the list of things (along with coffee, alcohol and tomato sauce) that can cause a flare-up. Possibly it is acidic, like coffee.