“1)What, exactly, is a curry? I read one particular fantasy author who is British quite heavily, and one of the foods mentioned repeatedly in his series. (That and the Three
Joy Luck Take Away on the site of the old Temple of the Fish God…) I gather that
it’s some sort of rice dish, with a hot sauce? With bits of vegetables, peas and such?”
Ah, Terry Pratchett. One of my fave’s. “I could murder a curry.”
I wouldn’t take this as gospel, but in the Indian cookbooks I use, curries are generally meat and/or vegetables cooked in a sauce which incorporates a mixture of spices (cardamom, coriander, fenugreek, cumin, pepper, etc.) and onions, garlic, etc. The sauce can can also contain pureed vegetables, cream or yogurt, coconut milk and other things. They are eaten with rice or Indian-style breads and they can be fiercely hot from fresh or dried pepper or they can be quite mild. Death likes his very hot, I believe.
There are also Thai and other southeast Asian dishes that are called curries, but Pratchett seems to be referring to the Indian type.
Results of my father’s tests: Rye whiskey (“Canadian?”) is the best for cutting the heat if you’ve eaten something you find to be too hot. Other whiskies are good, but rye is best.
I am losing my ability to tolerate cap as I get older, but the only time it’s ever been Truly Unbearable was that open-air “Sichuan Hot Pot” restaurant in Chengdu. I managed two bites - one at the start of the meal, and one at the end “just to be polite.”
(They never change the red water, and probably(?) don’t need to…)
Regarding “Hunan Hand” (appropriate) and Yangtze River cuisines in general, the Chinese have a little poem. Since I’m not a poet, your patience with my mostly-literal translation is appreciated:
SPICY
Zhejiang-folk not-fear hot,
Sichuan-folk hot fear-not,
Hunan-folk fear not-hot.
I have a similare thai story. we have a restraunt here called the Siam House. they rate the dishes on a pepper scale. 1=mild, 4=crazy from the heat.
But the place’s record is 28 peppers from some white guy (not racist, just pointing out he wasn’t thai).
so my question is, what really is the difference between 14 peppers and 28. can your mouth really tell a difference. and also, who thought fire was a spice?
I noticed that in Chinese restaurants the amount of heat in dishes depends on the chefs preferences. For instance, one of my favorite dishes, Mongolian Beef is a spicy dish, but I ask for mild because I am a heat wimp :). Anyway, the mild version is hot enough to cause my nose to run and give me the sniffles. I really would hate to try the hot version!.
I am also constantly amazed by the heat tolerance of two of my friends. We were at a pizza joint in SF one day and my friend Abe covered his pizza entirely in those hot pepper flakes. The boy likes his stuff hot! We were also at a Vietnamese restaurant and he and my friend Ann ordered pho (noodle soup). She challenged him to a heat contest. I swear, they both almost used up a bottle of hot chili sauce.
Another interesting heat related story is, I was watching the show “Travelers” when it was on the Discovery channel, and one of the male tour guides went to a market in Mexico City, and there they found habanero chiles (the hottest variety). The guide he was with dared him to taste just a nibble of the pepper (he said he liked his food hot). When he bit into the pepper he looked like he was in pain! Five minutes after he said it still burned.
Oh and for heat cures for those who dont drink, drinking milk really helps to ease the flames (or anything sugary, at least for me).
I got plenty of habeneros – I grew ‘em this year for my ho’made hot sauce. Also, thai, cayenne, purple thai and tabasco. Lots o’ peppers around here. Now I just have to take a day to mix up this year’s batch of sauce and bottle it.
Re: the “Ring of Fire” effect – Never happened to me. Once it’s past the tongue, it ceases to bother me. Spicy food in general isn’t hard on my stomach – greasy food hits me a lot harder.
And Scoville Units – as I recall jalapenos come in around 300 - 500, cayennes from 500 - 2000 and habeneros at 300,000!
Hunan hand – my hands and wrists burned for two days after this years picking and chopping session. Next year I WILL wear gloves if I grow habeneros again.
I don’t know just what is meant by respiratory effects, but I do know that if I am all stuffed up with a cold and I eat a lot of hot sauce my nose runs.
When my boss was pregnant she had a cold and I advised her to eat some hot spicey foods (her doctor told her not to take anything to clear up her nose). It worked like a charm it broke up her nasal congenstion.
My favorite spicy snack:
Put a slice of habañero on a saltine cracker, and spread a little cream cheese on it. Very yummy, but not for the uninitiated. (The cream cheese cuts the heat a little, but it’s still quite hot.)
For me, I just like enough heat to get things warm but not so hot I can’t taste the food. That’s what I worried about when I tried Kim Chee for the first time (summer kim chee, not the nasty winter kind!). It actually was pleasantly hot and very good with a bowl of rice. The local Korean market owners make it fresh, and bottle their own jars of it. My favorite is the cabbage type.
I actually have major cravings for that stuff once in a while. You can tell I’m eating it because the whole house smells like it :). Unfortunately it doesn’t last too long and it turns sour quick (nasty too), so I have to consume it within two or three days of buying it!
To the question about the relative heats of double the amount of peppers: I don’t know if the effects from the heats of different peppers grow exponentially (as the Scoville chart seems to imply) or not. But I do know that, if I simply doubled the amount of habeñaros, my dish would go from pleasantly hot to unbearable. Doubling the peppers definitely makes a quite noticeable difference.
I once took a bet to bite into a habeñero. I took an bite into it like it was an apple (which is a very stupid thing to do BTW) and I never recovered from it for at least an hour. It was like living hell in my mouth.
Moral of story : Never take bets on eating food you never heard of.
I was under the impression that the hottest peppers on earth were Scotch Bonnets. They are smallish, yellow or orange and have a “crumpled” appearance (hence the name, I guess). I once read an article saying that biting into a scotch bonnet was akin to a nuclear explosion inside one’s head.
I don’t know where they are native, but you can get them in the carribean.
Yes, Scotch Bonnet peppers are even hotter than habañeros, but they seem a bit harder to get hold of. I’ve never seen any place that sells Scotch Bonnets, though I can buy a package of habañeros in the supermarket.
Regarding Scotch Bonnets, my dad has a hot sauce that has a number for a name (recipe #7, I believe) and it’s only ingredients are Habeneros, Scotch Bonnets, vegetable oil, and capsaicin. I put about 1/4 a tsp in a huge bowl of chili, and it made it damn hot.
One day in 10th grade, my math teacher promised an A to anyone who ate a habenero. I ate two. It was damn hot going down, but not at all unbearable. I didn’t have to even get a drink. I chewed it up, too, in case you were wondering. Later that night, I was taking a dump before getting into the shower. I felt a burning deep in my bowels, and thought I was ready for what came next. It had me biting my lip till it bled, and crying, tears streaming down my face. I slowly got off the toilet without wiping (would have hurt WAY too badly!) and stood in the ice cold shower, cheeks spread with my hands, ice water hammering at my poor sphincter for about 20 minutes. Eat habeneros at your own risk.
–Tim
P.S. Some guys who weren’t in class that day didn’t believe me that I did it, so I ate another one. I was young. I was stupid. Very stupid.
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first “lost generation” nor today’s lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.
I think that the heat of an habeñaro is such that eating a slice without additional food would be too brutal for me, yet I could eat that slice in a sandwich or whatever. As for eating whole ones straight (except by some sort of expert), that sounds like we are talking about different kinds of habeñaros.
Someone brought me up some little (like mini-jalepeños or stubby seranos) peppers from Louisiana that she called habeñaros. They were hot but nothing like what I know as habeñaros in either looks or heat. Has the name been transferred to other species?
Jalepeños have been preserved diluted so that you can eat them straight out of the jar. Has the same thing been done with habeñaros?
If not, my hat is off to anyone who could eat straight and alone more than a little bit of one. I have a decent tolerance but trying to eat a whole habeñaro would send me into fits before it ever passed my mouth.
Scotch Bonnetts are a variant of the garden variety Habanero, usually yellow or orange and very hot. Neither is as hot the Red Savina ™ which is another hab variant grown only under a license from the company that developed it. Makes a dandy loaf of “The Bread”
Related, mostly: What is it about wasabi (the japanese ‘horseradish’-- green stuff)? If you take a bite it goes straight into your brain, wreaking havok and clearing out your sinuses, but it leaves none of that capascin pain in the mouth area. It’s a chile-like feeling, but with no ‘aftereffects’. Does anyone know about how this works (I realize there’s no capascin, so that oil isn’t there to linger, but what is it in wasabi that is ‘hot’)?
Real wasabi is much more different. I have not had it since it costs $45 dollars a pound here, and $100 in Japan. It grows in mountain streams in I believe just one province in Japan, so thats why it’s expensive. I hear the Japanese are envious of the prices here, because there is a grower in Oregon who has commercialized production of it, thus bringing down it’s price.
As for the wasabi you find in supermarkets and in most sushi restaurants is really a little bit of wasabi (or even just horseradish) with chinese mustard and green dye. Anyway, wasabi is in the mustard family and the heat you get is from the mustard oils. Wasabi also comes from the stem of the plant, and is served grated (if authentic).
‘The beginning calls for courage; the end demands care’
Yes, that is what i meant when I said the hottest variety, i just couldn’t remember the name. Anyway, i had a seed catalogue that was selling the seeds of the Red Savina variety. They said the seeds were hard to obtain and that one should be very cautious with these as they beat out every other pepper as to hotness.
