There is a definite niche market for new flavors of hot sauce (whether we’re talking about salsa or the kind of stuff you put on chicken wings). Amongst hot sauce fans there is a further subset of folks like myself who like to test our taste buds with the hottest sauce we can possibly find. Thing is, I find that once the sauce gets to a certain degree of spiciness (ie. I’m taking a gulp of beer or water for every bite I take) it all seems to have the same effect. At least on my taste buds: I generally judge a “good” ultrahot sauce from a “bad” ultrahot sauce by it’s effect on my stomach. Some establishments put a ton of fire in their sauce to cover up it’s shortcomings and overreliance on too much vinegar.
So, my question is: is there a limit to how spicy the human taste buds can actually register?
Capsaicin, the “hot” element in chiles, doesn’t affect the taste buds but rather pain receptors. My SWAG is that once all the pain receptors in your mouth are firing at maximum, more capsaicin will have no effect. However, repeated exposure to capsaicin will de-sensitize the pain receptors, so more will be needed to achieve the same effect as before.
I saw a bottle of that “pure cap” hot sauce a while back, and the label bragged that it was “20 times hotter than jalapeno!”. Jalapenos max out at around 10,000 Scovilles, while habeneros don’t even start until 200,000 Scovilles. Which would put that “pure cap” at about the same level as a weak habanero, at most, which is still far short of genuine pure capsaicin, at around 16,000,000 Scovilles.
To be fair, the sauses on that page that are over 1,000,000 Scovilles are additives, not actual sauces. The page does have a “hot sauce” with a 500,000 value, though. I’ll give that to my father to try…he seems to have lost all sense of pain in his mouth over the years. Maybe that will wake him up?
I believe someone makes a product which is essentially crystallized capsaicin in a very small amount of oil. This would approach the ultimate heat, at least as far as capsaicin heat is concerned, I suppose.
At least in Canada, anything over 357,000 Scoville is not a sauce, but a food additive. If you buy anything over that from http://www.chillychiles.com , they have to take it out of this locked glass case, and you get to sign some nice legal forms.
