putrid, the habañero of which I speak has a pretty yellow-orange color, is approximately round, and is maybe an inch or so long. They’re far too hot to eat as a regular diet, but I can deal with them on a limited basis. (I don’t know if I’d call myself an “expert”, but I do eat some very hot stuff, so I’m sure my tolerance is pretty high.)
JBENZ, I just checked the label on my package of store-bought habañeros, and there is a tilde over the n. I admit that I don’t know any Spanish myself, so I can’t tell whether this is correct. I’ve seen it written both ways, but the ñ seemed more correct to my untrained ear, because the end of the word is pronounced like “yeah-rows” (as opposed to “arrows”).
I had that Carribean hot sauce made of Scottish Bonnets. If you ever find some, NEVER TAKE IT WITHOUT FOOD!!! (I learned that the hard way )If you do, you’ll get some really bad headaches and sometimes even hallucinations, as well as the worst fire sensation in your mouth.
As we have so many real hot pepper eaters here, this seems a good place to ask for support of one of my contentions. My friends & relatives constantly accuse me of having lost all my sense of taste due to pepper eating, while I time-after-time prove that my sense of taste is actually more acute than any of theirs. I do not say that peppers have heightened my tasting ability but they certainly do not seem to have hobbled it any. Back me up?
Putrid, you’re right. Peppers don’t destroy your sense of taste (or smell, for that matter). They’re just awfully distracting to those who haven’t built up a tolerance.
Bob the Random Expert
“If we don’t have the answer, we’ll make one up.”
Nope…it’s “Ha Ba Ner O” not “Ha Ban Yer O” with a ~ I’m not a Spanish speaker myself but the Spanish speakers on the ChileHead list are pretty emphatic about it. May have something to do with regional pronunciations.
Cap will not destroy your sense of taste. If anything chile will enhance it just as exposure to any new type of food will. Of course, people who don’t do hot stuff tend to get blown away by the heat and not recognize anything else. A real chilehead can tell what kind of chile it is just by what part of his tongue burns first. Cayennes burn the front immediately, habs burn the back after a short delay.
The height of humor is handing a newbie something heavily laced with habs and saying “Here, try this. It’s not too hot.” They usually just have time to say “That’s not too bad” before the top of their head comes off.
Note: You don’t get to laugh at this until someone has done it to you. Sweet, innocent 17 year old teeny bopper in Boston handed me a chunk of pretty pink bread. “Try this,” she sez, smiling innocently, “it’s very nice.” “Yeah” sez I, chomping down a big bite, “That’s not bad at…Holy Shit!!” (And me 40 yards from the beer keg.) That, boys and girls, is the Red Savina.
Interestingly enough, people who live on a diet rich in hot spices, like Mexicans and so on, have virtually no incidents of stomach ulcers and actually a lower incidence of heart problems like clogged arteries.
Sorry I’m late.
Flypsyde, If you come to India and ask for curry (anywhere in India) you will get the ‘broth’ part of the meal. Curry is an ‘English? Anglicized?’ generic name for anything Indian. A ‘Chicken Curry’ is Chicken made in a liquid broth - the ‘curry’. In India, it has no connection with the spice. Even vegetables can either be cookec ‘dry’ or with ‘curry’.
Also spicy should not be confused with ‘hot’. South India cooking is generally more ‘Chilli-HOT’ high temperature, short time flash cooking, Northern Indian Cooking is more ‘Spicy’, lower temperature and with generally longer cooking times. More like the eastern European Goulash’s and stews. Contarary to popular belief, meat cooking at home is generally rare. Animals are consumed the day they are slaughtered (usually tuesdays) no freezing although that is changing.
Putrid, there’s a “science for fun”-type show appearing on PBS (with your host, Alan Alda). The only episode I saw concerned the senses and capsaicin, both as spice and pain reliever. IIRC [caveat emptor, baby!], the people being interviewed in the “taste” part divided the population into three types: ~ Poor Tasters, Regular Tasters, and Super Tasters. The difference, which was easy to determine with use of some dye, related directly to the number of “taste buds” and/or nerve endings in the mouth and was presumably genetically-linked. Super Tasters are much more sensitive to tastes than other people because they have more receptors.
Anyway, one of the counter-intuitive things they found was that Super Tasters often love hot stuff more than others even though it should in theory cause them MORE pain. IIRC, the guess was that the Super Tasters’ receptors got overwhelmed faster (or something like that), so that the pain was faster/more intense but shorter, leaving them to enjoy some effect unknown to the rest of the people who couldn’t get past the “prolonged” pain.
MarkSerlin: If it hasn’t been mentioned above, I believe that capsaicin is also supposed to be a vaso-dilator. That (presumably) is why it is popular as a muscle rub, and could in part explain both hallucinations and observed differences in heart/vascular morbidity rates.
I never heard of anyone being permanently hurt by hot peppers. I eat hot sauce at every meal and I think it teaches self control, after all, it’s not real pain, it’s “fake” pain that you can overcome. Actually I’d like to see a study where they give a woman in labor regular doses of hot sauce to see if it “cancels” out the pain from contractions. I also talk to my dentist about doing a study to see if regular pepper eaters have better teeth. I personally think they do from all the salivating that the heat generates. Remember, it’s not real pain !!!
That’s marketing hype. DIS is a cap extract sauce, just hot for the sake of hot. It TASTES like burning cat fur. If you want something that actually tastes like food but will still blow yer brains out of yer ears, scare up a bottle of Da Bomb.
I buy a lot of my stuff from a guy named Jim Campbell in Indiana. He’s a licensed Red Savina grower and he makes a couple of sauces that make Dave’s look like ketchup. He’s at: http://www.wildpepper.com/ (I have no connection 'cept being a happy consumer).
)If you do, you’ll get some really bad headaches and sometimes even hallucinations, as well as the worst fire sensation in your mouth.