I like spicy food, but I can’t or don’t want to deal with crazy levels of spice at my age anymore. Habaneros are the spiciest pepper I ever want to deal with, these days
My 17 year old son can handle insane levels of heat. When we were at my sister and BIL’s thi spast summer, BIL had a Paqui challenge chip and asked my son if he wanted to take the challenge. I was leery and tried to talk him out of it, but he was all set to do it. He took it like a champ and seemed to have little visible discomfort.
Ed Currie, the South Carolina hot pepper expert who crossbred and grew the Carolina Reaper that’s hotter than most pepper sprays police use to subdue unruly criminals, has broken his own world record with a pepper that’s three times hotter.
…just wanted to mention that I thought it’s amusingly on the mark that a guy named ‘Currie’ is breeding hot peppers.
Wow. I am impressed. I don’t think there’s any point in my life where I would have been able to handle that chip without visible discomfort. And it tastes awful, IMHO.
Between breakfast and lunch one day it all went away. Dabbing hot sauce directly on my tongue barely registered. It was very depressing. I can’t say exactly the percentage that came back but it certainly isn’t 100%. Smell too. It did make me like spicy food more.
I guess it’s better than nothing. My mom had a friend in the 40s who was in a car accident and lost her sense of smell/taste. I always thought it sounded like a horrible outcome.
I used to love spicy food. On some level, I still do, but - at my age (61), the consequences are dire, and embarrassing! Even my favourite Hakka restaurant has not seen me in about 5 years, since the last time I ate there, it was closer to a colonoscopy prep than a fine dining experience…
That’s where I’m at. My heat tolerance is much higher than anybody else in my social circles, but still well below competitive growing/eating levels.
By the time you’re measuring a pepper’s heat against a Reaper, it’s deeply into “oh hell no but you go and have fun with your life choices” territory for me.
Yes. I like food with some heat to it, but I want flavor to go along with it, not just overpowering heat.
I don’t get this whole “pepper arms race”. The world’s hottest pepper seems more about bragging rights, something you’d eat on a dare or to win a bet, not something with any serious culinary purpose.
ETA: Actually “pepper arms race” might be pretty apt. It might be more useful as a weapon than as a culinary ingredient.
I love hot foods, and granted, the more you eat, the higher your tolerance generally grows…
But no. That’s silly hot.
If for some unknown reason, the world lost most of it’s capsicums, sure, I’d probably buy them and add a few grams worth to some other dish to season with, lacking better options, but short of adding one (!) to a cauldron of chili for giggles and bragging rights (or various levels of masochistic challenges) there doesn’t seem to be a culinary need for such things.
And again, I say this as someone who makes their own hotsauce with lemon juice, salt, garlic, peaches and habaneros. For 99% of the hotheads I know out there, you don’t ever need anything more powerful than a habanero.
Must be a cultural thing. Not my perversion. And the thought of shitting a million Scoville the day after is just not something I would look foward to. Why do people do this volontarily? I don’t understand.
This’ll depend on one’s digestion. When I eat hot peppers, even the Trinidad Scorpion mentioned above, there was no issue of it coming out the other end. Meanwhile, if I eat pickled jalapenos, which are much, much milder, there often is a bit of heat coming out the backside. I have no idea why–my body somehow processes the two in different ways.
Ghost peppers are just a bit hotter than Scotch bonnets, as in, less than an order of magnitude. Even this thing is just under an order of magnitude above a Scotch bonnet or habanero.
Which means, to me, that there’s not much culinary value to them. Use Pepper X in some dish, and you could instead get the same level of heat by using ten times as many habaneros. Which would also taste better (habaneros are surprisingly flavorful, if you can get past the heat). The only reason to need something hotter than a hab is if your dish already has such a high concentration of peppers that you can’t just add more. And even if for some reason you really do want it that hot, well, there’s concentrated capsaicin extract for that (though, note, that the hot sauce named “Pure Cap” is not, in fact, pure capsaicin; far from it).
I’m fine with habanero-based sauce. I also have a grinder filled with dried ghost peppers that I got from Trader Joe’s. A (very) small twist is enough to spice up anything to the point of inducing forehead sweat. It has a wonderful flavor, but anything beyond a light dusting is ill-advised. I also have a bottle of Tabasco scorpion sauce which may be hotter, and must be used with much discretion. A drop in a bowl of chili is plenty. I can’t see a use for these X peppers though. I’ve already felt pepper hell. I needn’t try to intensify it at this point.
highly unlikely … I was a bit involved in superhots - some 10+ years ago when the hottest was the trinidad scorpion … they all taste extremely “chemical” (tender notes of solvent, paint-stripper and a long aftertaste of terpentin), most likely to the high capsaicin content
but I can speak to a endorphine high when taking a good bite out of those …unfortunately you are in no condition to enjoy those … so yeah …
I might catch some heat for this - but that is really an american thing … bigger/faster/louder you get it… and of course the fact that the CalReaper made a lot of people rich - turbocharged this meaningless race to the top …
I just read somewhere that they are 49x as hot as Scotch bonnets, but here’s a link calling them about 3 times hotter. And here is one saying they are (approximately) seven times hotter.
So yes, that is less than one order of magnitude. Still, given that Scotch bonnets are no slouch in the heat department, that is still plenty hot.
I think it’s more like comparing a paper cut to an amputation - the degree is going to make a difference. Also, the heat isn’t just about what you feel on your tongue. There’s how it feels in your stomach and intestines, and how long the effects last. It could be anything from no internal pain, to a slight temporary sting around the anus, to slightly achy intestines, to six hours of explosive diarrhea. And numerous steps in between.