I like spicey foods but I really don’t like using scotch bonnet peppers in cooking, though they’re okay in hot sauces (my favourite is Matouk’s). On the other hand, I can handle way more of those small green Indian chilies and Thai firebirds…but even 1/2 a scotch bonnet will make me feel physicall ill. Also, there is a point at which overloading on spices makes the food taste bitter to me, even if I can handle the level of spice.
Hot and spicy = good, Hot and Spicy that overwhelms all other flavors = not good. If, say, your chili has so much heat that you can’t taste the beef, what’s the point in having it?
I am from whitebread, Illinois…growing up, we considered French’s mustard “spicy”.
My SO was raised in Germany - growing up, they considered two shakes of pepper in a five gallon pot to be “spicy”.
Now, we both love Indian food, curries, salsa, jalapenos…if we make food and don’t need to grab a Kleenex after the third bite, it is too bland. I am not quite sure how this happened, but somehow over the years, and living in Southern California, we have developed a taste for the spicier, the better.
Didn’t I read awhile back that salsa recently overtook ketchup as the number one condiment sold in the US?
I like hot - the hotter the better. One of my Christmas presents was a case of hot sauce. For some reason, the heat doesn’t bother me at all once it’s past my mouth, so no gastro-intestinal (or rectal) limitations, thank goodness.
And I like all kinds of hot and pretty much all kinds of spicy: Indian, Thai, Ethiopian, Mexican. In fact, these are my favorite foods.
It depends on what I’m eating, but I generally like very spicy foods. Problem is, my sense of spice is so uncalibrated to most people these days that whenever I add peppers to dishes for guests, it invariably is too hot for them.
Certain dishes–like Thai holy basil chicken (gai pad gaprao), I need blazingly hot. There’s only one place I’ve been to in Chicago that made it as hot as I like it the first time out. I’ve been to other places and reiterated the fact that I want it “Thai spicy,” and it’s almost always no hotter than a medium to me. shrug Once a chef even came up to me and asked me how the food was, I said good, but I really wanted this spicy. He said, oh, next time you’re here I’ll make it spicy for you. I never went back to that place because I asked him the first time to trust me and make it blazingly hot.
More complicated foods like curries I like a step below blazingly hot. It probably still would be inedibly hot for a lot of people, but I like to taste a little more flavor in curries. With holy basil chicken, all you have is fish sauce and basil, basically, competing for your attention. They’re both very assertive flavors. With curry, there’s a little more subtlely, so I like to dial it down a notch for those.
Oddly enough, same with Buffalo wings. I like them at the medium-hot level. Never really did get into suicide wings. Not that they were too hot, just wayyy to acidic, and not buttery/margarine-y enough.
I use Dave’s Insanity, Wonza’s (2 million Scoville), and the such on occassion, but my hottest day-to-day hot sauce is El Yucateco’s Habanero (especially their extra-hot Kutbil-ik Mayan recipe). I do like Tabasco, but I use that more for flavor/acidity than heat, because it really doesn’t contribute much heat at all to my tastes.
I love spicy food. Regular Chinese restaurant classifications of “spicy” don’t even taste spicy to me. But, I can’t handle it as spicy as my father-in-law likes it. (He grows his own peppers and adds them to everything)
Just to give you some equal measure that you can all relate to, the hot sauce they serve at the “Chipotle” chain restaurant is perfect for me. Any hotter is probably too much.
Coincidentally, my friend said that his wife thinks that Heinz ketchup is a tad too spicy for her. He must have been joking, right? Right?
That is the only thing that stops me from eating even hotter food. I mean, going out it doesn’t taste like anything and burns like sh… hmm, bad pun.
I wonder what a doctor would say about a yoghurt enema. 
The best sauces are the home-made. Tabasco et al have got too much fillers and vinegar, it irritates my stomach. I usually make my own sauce at home. In the fridge it seems to last a looong time.
I like food very hot. The only hot pepper grown here is about habenero in strength, and every dish is served with a side of either pepper sauce or powdered hot pepper mix. It’s very good, but very intense…I can’t handle much of it. The best thing is when someone serves you something like porcupine or grubs you can slather them with pepper sauce and it all tastes pretty much the same.
I luuuurve it hot! hot! hot! I have yet to meet my match for food that’s too hot for me to enjoy the flavors.
I love it. I like a little bit of pain - just borderline.
The biggest problem (especially in the West) is the macho element. People try to prove something by eating food hotter and hotter. That is utterly missing the point. There is no point in suffering - you just have to find the edge of what you can handle, and enjoy that. There’s no shame in having lots of side dishes of things like coconut, bananas, or cucumber to quench the fires. It’s gotten to the point where I’m reluctant to tell people I like food really hot.
But there is something in spicy heat that makes me feel alive and alert.
I love spicy foods and I can take the hottest pepper without breaking a sweat. It’s when it reaches the other end of the GI tract when it becomes a problem.
Too much information? You bet!
If it’s done right, I like really, really spicy food once in a while. It has to allow the other flavors through, though. There’s a Caribbean restaurant here in town called Harry Singh’s. Harry uses the peppers he grew up with in Trinidad/Tobago and they’re burn-your-head-off hot but still allow all the other flavors of the food to come through. He doesn’t make dishes extremely hot unless he knows you and knows you like it. Three of us in my circle of friends are masochistic enough that the heat from Harry’s food makes my hands shake, another of the three hiccups uncontrollably, and the third sweats so hard his hair looks like he just came out of the shower. Our other friends come along just for the entertainment value.
I love spicy food, but like other posters, I don’t eat it for the heat. It must be tasty too. Just adding more and more chilis doesn’t do it for me.
Both my wife and I are fans of hot, spicy food, but not at the expense of flavor.
There truly is an art to cooking flavorful foods that contain some heat. We’re finding that what works for us is to take the inherent heat of a given dish to a medium-high level, then add more if necessary via external sources. Chili oils, salsas, (maybe just some chopped habaneros) etc., can serve to really heat up an already hot dish, if needed.
There used to be a Thai restaurant in Milwaukee named The King and I. They had Mild, Moderate, Hot, and Native Thai for spice levels. When you asked for Native Thai, they tried to talk you out of it. Really good food.
In 2005 while I was in the UK, I had some fantastic hot food, from a small hole in the wall Indian place in Glasgow to a very nice restaurant near Covent Garden in London. The curry in London was possibly the hottest meal I have ever had, it was definitely the hottest thing on the menu, and it tasted great. I do seem to have an advantage when eating hot foods, like sturmhauke it never burns on the way out.
I don’t like eating peppers straight, but I do love them in my food. A guy at work used to bring in his home made salsa, pretty much straight habenaros. I could eat it fine, but after the first time I never bothered. He missed the point, it was just hot, there was no flavor there. It was both hot and bland at the same time. 
That’s curious, as I consider habaneros to have quite a unique flavor among the peppers. They’re very distinct and intensely flavorful on their own (along with their cousins, the Scotch bonnet), and I don’t think they need much of anything else to add additional flavor to them.
Don’t ask me. I have friends that make a delicious habenaro salsa that is also very hot. The guy at work just had hot.
The hotter the better, baby.
I had a customer last year where one of the resident techs was a guy from Jamaica. I mentioned that I loved good, hot jerk chicken and he brought me his mother’s jerk sauce. It was unbelievable; just a light sheen of moisture on your finger popped into your mouth required a drink of water. It was like eating sauce made of gasoline after the gasoline’s been set on fire.
I loved it. Mmm, jerk chicken. I’m looking forward to going back there this year because he said he’d get his Mom to make me a whole jug.
I like things a bit spicy, but I’m sure I’m nowhere near some of the chili-heads in this thread.
On a scale of 1-10, I’d say I was comfortable with a 3 to 5 level of heat. If I need a drink of water after three bites, that’s just right. If I need a drink after every bite, that’s too much.
Recently, a brilliant chef opened a nouveau Mexican place here in my one-horse town. The man is a genius with sauces and moles. I ordered chicken pipian; pipian is a green pumpkin seed mole, and his was complex and rich and luscious. Also, it was very hot. I was mopping up the mole with tender homemade corn tortillas, sweating, and diving for the water glass. Mr. brown ordered chicken in regular mole, a deep mahogany-red masterpiece which was even hotter. That meal was pushing the heat tolerance factor, but damn, it was good. Next time I’ll try the “spicy” tamarind shrimp.
Your mistake is in reaching for water. Go for milk, yogurt, ice cream, or some of the other substances that will bind to the capsaicin and cool down the burn. Water just spreads it around more.