A single tortilla chip, flavored with Carolina Reaper and Scorpion peppers. Sold in a coffin-shaped box for a ridiculous price, with warnings for anyone overly sensitive or allergic to capsaicin. Advice to wash your hands before touching your eyes or other sensitive areas, and to seek medical attention if you have difficulty breathing after eating it.
So I opened the package, smelled it (hint of lime?), then picked the chip up. I then put the chip back down and licked my fingers. And that made my lips and tongue as hot as I care for them to be. If I do actually eat this thing it’s going to be one crumb at a time over a couple of weeks.
I tried their fiery limon version. It’s only about 20k scoville units, a LOT less than their one chip challenge variety, which has 1.7 million scovilles. I ate 3 of the limon, then felt some burn, and in 5 minutes things were fine.
I once tried Flash Bang sauce, which has 7.1 million scoville units. Fortunately I just dipped a toothpick in the stuff, and touched the tip to my tongue. Ultra hot, & intense but it didn’t trigger bronchospasm or any real untoward symptoms. A little cream cheese and I was back to normal in 20 minutes.
That is legitimately hot, all right, almost certainly too hot to make a nice snack for anyone, but if you do not get a bag full of chips then you are being ripped off, no matter how hot it is.
frito lay did this a while back and got in some trouble because older kids (think 5-12th grade) were going through bags of spicy doritos to find the “most spicy” chips and eating them in one mouthful and getting sick from it as a “challenge”
I’m glad I approached it with caution and not my usual hot pepper gusto. I took a little bite about the size of a pinkie finger nail to just gauge the heat and it lit me up real good. Not enough that I had to reach for the milk or bread or anything, but pretty much at the end point of my heat tolerance. It’s pretty brutal. I’ve eaten an entire Trinidad scorpion pepper raw before, and the fingernail-sized piece of chip was already like most of the way there to that heat.
I don’t want to imagine what eating a whole chip would have done to me. It’s not the head heat I’d be concerned about, but rather what happens in my stomach afterwards. When I had that Trinidad scorpion on an empty stomach years ago, it felt like a team of angry fire ants had settled in my stomach about a half hour later, and I couldn’t even stand up.
So I left it at that little corner of a chip. A few hours later, I tried to bite off the absolute tiniest bit of chip I could, and it still lit up my mouth pretty damned good.
This is not even on the same level of spiciness as something that Doritos, Fritos, or Takis puts out. We’re several orders of magnitude spicier than that.
Just curiosity. That’s why I bought mine. I didn’t give a shit about doing the actual challenge. I love stupid spicy foods, but I’m not going to hurt myself by ramming the thing down my throat before I get a sense of just how hot it is.
I once tried a ghost pepper stout that was being given away at a bar event. The brewer poured a thimble sized pour into a disposable shot glass. If you wanted a full shot after tasting the sip, they’d fill your shot glass.
Most people sniffed their sample, coughed/gagged, then threw it away. I drank my sip, then coughed a bit. I asked for a full shot and slowly drank it, then got a second.
I was pretty sick for two days after the experience.
Yeah, the actual chip tastes like shit. There’s nothing going on there. The ingredients are just corn, oil, scorpion chile, reaper chile, blue food coloring (for some stupid reason. I guess that was this year’s gimmick.) And I don’t know how in the hell those peppers are so concentrated, as I have both dried and ground scorpion and reaper chiles from my garden, and none are that potent that a mere dip of a wet finger’s worth would set my face afire like these. I would have sworn there is capsaicin extract being used, as this is the only time I’ve ever felt that sort of sharp heat, but that’s not in the ingredients.
Meanwhile, Paqui’s ghost pepper chips (sold in a normal bag in normal chip quantities meant for normal consumption) are quite decent – easily the hottest commercially available chips I’ve been able to find on the market, but still well within the bounds of edibility from me.
I did the one chip challenge last night with my son and recorded it. Although we both only ate about 1/4 of a chip, it was plenty hot!! I lasted about 4 minutes before going for the milk.
It’s hot as Hades. Someone brought one to me at the bar a few years back. I hate it regularly… while chewing and eating it, it was not terrible, but the pain just grew and grew in my mouth and belly. Ended up chugging a beer and that still didn’t dissipate it. Unfortunately the bar did not have any milk.
When he was on Hot Ones – a YouTube series where the host interviews a celebrity as they both eat chicken wings with an increasingly spicy series of hot sauces – Alton Brown critiqued the sauces he was trying. Some he liked, but at least one – “Da Bomb”, IIRC – he found chemical and synthetic-tasting, with no character other than extreme heat. I believe he called it a “stunt sauce”. If memory serves, he did like some of the even hotter ones, so it wasn’t just the fire.