I remember when the trend was to see who could make the hottest chicken sandwiches the ones jack in the box and wendys damn near killed me and my doc said I needed to stop eating them … I remember bk’s 99 cent sandwich they had in the 90-00s they were good at first but after a while, they were always burnt ,
Definitely don’t try a proper Nashville chicken sandwich (or Nashville chicken) if the Wendy’s one was hot for you. 
I’ve tried a few chicken sandwiches from various Canadian fast food chains. Most are mediocre. The Nashville one at Burger King did not taste spicy at all, though @pulykamell assured me this was inauthentic. Best one here is at Harvey’s.
Most are made from breast and not thigh or dark meat. Most have too much bread for the chicken. Most need better toppings and spicier sauce. If it was delicious, there is leeway on all of these things. But few are - I still don’t get the hype.
That old biddy will tell you she owns everything. Don’t believe her.
Nothing you get at a chain will get you close to what a proper Nashville hot chicken is. I’ve been to Prince’s in Nashville (the originator of hot chicken) and I got the extra hot (they have one or two levels above that) and it was pretty brutal. I mean, right at the very edge of what I could handle. (This was on fried chicken, not a sandwich.) I cannot imagine what the next level up would be like. There are a number of places here in Chicago that do hot chicken, but I’ve only been to Fry the Coop. It is glorious and absolutely faithful to the spice levels of Nashville. The extra hot (crazy) I could just finish – probably equal to Prince’s Extra spicy. The level above that (insanity) I could only get through one or two bites. It is, as its name says, insane. They say it is mostly ghost pepper and they estimate a million Scoville (that might be a bit exaggerated, but I wouldn’t be sure.) So this isn’t that horseshit “ghost pepper” marketing where they wave a pepper near the food and call it “ghost pepper.” (Although Paqui ghost pepper chips do pack a reasonable punch for something I can get at the gas station.) As someone who grows bhut jolokias, Carolina reapers, and Trinidad Scropions, they don’t kid around.
These days, when I eat there, I just get regular hot. That’s plenty spicy, and a level most of us corn-fed folk would consider extra hot.
Well almost… Hattie B’s is a chain (they have a location in Atlanta) and the top few levels are really damned spicy.
Hattie B’s is excepted, but I was thinking more major national chains. They are actually from Nashville, so they should know their spice levels.
I used to like Wendys buttermilk homestyle chicken sandwiches. It’s been dropped for several spicy versions. I can’t handle spicy.
Wendys still has a classic chicken sandwich that’s good.
I eat at Chick-fil-a a couple times a month.
Zaxbys is a good cjpice for spicy sandwiches.
Oho, we got a monarchist up in this bitch!
I like the idea of using “corn-fed” to distinguish, what, mid-Westerners from Mexicans or something :).
There’s a Nashville chicken shack around here. I enjoy food that’s a few levels hotter than Popeye’s spicy, but the medium at Rocky’s Hot Chicken Shack? It humbles me.
I think they still have the non-spicy. Ask for the classic. Don’t know if it’s buttermilk-flavored–the batter does have lactic acid–but it shouldn’t burn you up.
Haha. That said Nashville extra hot is far hotter than anything I’ve tasted at a Mexican restaurant. OK, there was one place that did an extra hot peanut salsa that had some ghost peppers added to it that really lit up my mouth and would have made Nashville’s extra hot proud. And I had a Yucatecan roasted habanero salsa that was somewhere between Nashville hot and extra hot. But, on the whole? The typical hottest Mexican dishes/sauces, in my experience, typically only register maybe between medium and hot on the Nashville chicken scale. Like the extra hot Valentina hot sauce? I’m not even sure that reaches a medium for me.
If what they serve down the road is any guide, that totally tracks. My favorite spicy memory was a “jalapeno popper” I got at a Mexican/Caribbean place in town, where the pepper was enormous and stuffed with shrimp and soft cheese and rice and coconut and who knows what else, and every bite just about shut down my other senses with the spice, but the flavor was so incredible that I kept going back for more, knowing I’d regret it. But generally, Mexican food (at least that I’ve tried) is in my tolerance zone.
Yeah, I find Asian food, for instance, a hell of a lot hotter. When I get “Thai Spicy” at my favorite Northern Thai/Laotian place, they don’t screw around. You don’t have to beg and plead with them that you really mean it. I once got cocky and asked for Thai Extra Spicy and I was only able to finish 1/4 of the dish at the restaurant. No other Thai restaurant has ever served something to me that I couldn’t finish, much less only a few spoonfuls. Had to take the rest home. But it was oh so good I kept poking at it (it’s a turmeric stir fry of some sort they call beef pad kamin, but I can’t find any good references to that dish online, no matter how I guess at variant spelling. And, man, there are variant spelling when it comes to Thai. I believe that simply transliterates as “beef fry turmeric.”)
I am not familiar with Nashville chicken but the spice level of Mexican food depends on where it’s from. Here in Arizona the main go-to is Sonoran because that’s the state we border and I would guess you’ll find moderate at best. California’s is even milder because well… California. Tex-Mex is best described as fusion.
New Mexico, though… well there’s a reason ristras are the de facto state flower.
Dagnabit!
I’ve been making oven-fried chicken lately and I’ve been buying breasts when I could been buying boneless thighs. Next time I’m trying thighs.
Yes, I use corn flakes. A lot of corn flakes.
My favorite fast food chicken sandwich is the Wendy’s spicy one. Unfortunately there’s no Wendy’s here, and Burger King currently just has a crispy chicken sandwich, which is acceptable, as long I tell them to leave off the mayonnaise, as they tend to be heavy handed.
Second favorite is a club sandwich with actual chicken.
Actually with both, having a good slice of tomato is sublime.
I’ve never had New Mexican in New Mexico proper, so I couldn’t say for sure. I’ve only had it next door in Arizona (which, like you said, has a milder heat level, so presumably is made to local tastes), and it’s not been anything I’d consider aggressively spicy. The spiciest Mexican I’ve had (minus the spiked peanut salsa) was, as I mentioned, the habanero-based salsa (which is essentially just habaneros, salt, garlic and bitter orange/lime) from the Yucatan. Some Caribbean can get up there (like Jamaica – even something like Walkerswood “mild” jerk paste is way too hot for family, at a level I would call at least “hot” for mass-market America); other Caribbean can be pretty bland. I’ve also bought the New Mexican tubs of red chile puree and they were – they had punch, but nothing like what I get in Asian cuisine, Jamaican, and some African cuisine.
Yeah, I was going to mention around here you can get some quite hot Mexican food. Almost every taqueria has a mild green sauce that’s usually just jalapenos and oil, and a hot orange/red sauce that’s pretty much just habaneros and some vinegar. The latter is not complete murder, but I usually ask for both and put both on each taco.
The salsa that you get with the chips at Ojeda’s or Herrera’s isn’t messing around at all. I usually scoop as much salsa as I can onto my chips. I exercise some restraint at both of those places.
But yeah, Mexican main dishes rarely seem get to the “dare” levels that Thai dishes can get to. I have had some guisadas that I couldn’t finish in one sitting, though.
I find it really difficult to compare how hot things are because I assume with time you can develop a tolerance.
When I was dating Mrs. L v1.0, she made some Indian food that had tears literally running down my face. It was delicious curry and I soldiered through but it was hotter than anything I’d tasted—not saying much, I was pretty inexperienced. The next day I discovered that there’s an “afterburner” effect. That rarely happens to me now.
We used to go to a Thai place that would just burn your hair off if you ordered it hot. Which I did. But I had to pace myself to finish a plate. It helped that they offered ice cream afterward.
Visiting my bro, we went to a place that served a really hot burger. I took about 2 bites and thought, ‘I probably can’t finish this.’ Not sure what they used for the heat. But once my palate adjusted, I managed.
The Nashville chicken I had was every bit as hot as any of them. Mrs. L v2.0 got some at the mildest level they offered and she really struggled. I was a couple notches up…I finished but didn’t think the flavor of the chicken was all that.
Overall, I’m going to go with Asian as the hottest. A waitress at a Thai place once refused to let me order a particular spicy dish, steering me to something else. This place had little bowls of chili powder (and a tiny spoon) so you could tweak it, and I added a bunch after tasting it. She came back later with the check. I started spooning chili powder on my tongue…she said, “OK, next time.”
You absolutely can, and do. Part of the reason I seek out hotter and hotter foods is because normally “hot” foods don’t give me the sting they used to when I was, say, a teenager. For example, I remember Tabasco searing my taste buds off as a kid; now, it’s just a flavored vinegar to me, for all the heat it carries. When I cook for my family, I do not include any chiles in it, as I don’t have an accurate way of gauging it. When I aim for mild, my wife can barely eat it. So I just add at the table for myself. I’ve had burgers or chicken wings at these “heat challenge” places where I had to (in one case) even sign a liability waiver (which I assume was just for show–got my picture on the wall, too), and finished the dishes without any issue, just a satisfying tingle of heat in my mouth and on my lips. But the Thai extra hot or an extra hot Nashville chicken and I was begging for mercy.
They’ve done this to me at a few Thai places. I would insist on Thai spicy. Even say “pet pet” (which is a way of indicating spiciness in Thai), and they would bring out a dish that was maybe medium hot. The server would check in on me and notice I haven’t even taken a sip of my water. Then they would say, okay, next time we’ll give you the Thai spicy. With those places, I’ve rarely made it to a “next time.” Like, I understand why they do that, but when I’m emphatic about how hot I want it and even try to learn to vocabulary for it, trust me that this isn’t my first rodeo.
With the Northern Thai-Lao place, they gave me the Thai spicy right off the bat. There was also another (now defunct) place I used to go to where the first time I ordered the holy basil chicken (that’s one I love scorchingly hot because the intense flavors play off each other well) “Thai spicy”, the older Thai gentlemen raised his eyebrows and said “Are you sure?” with a foreboding ton. “Yes!” “OK” he said. “You have chosen death,” I’d like to imagine he whispered as he walked away.
I was legit scared about that first bite, but it was exactly perfect, on the very edge of pleasurable heat where I could finish the entire dish. Customer for life or, well, the life of the restaurant, at least.