We often have pot-luck meals at work and one of my favorite things to bring is a crock pot of thin sliced, roasted pork loin covered in my homemade BBQ sauce. This has generally gone over quite nicely and I’ve never brought home leftovers. One complaint I’ve had about it though comes from the chile-heads who complain that it needs more spice. There’s some heat in my BBQ sauce but not a lot. Just two tablespoons each of black peppercorns (crushed) and red pepper flakes in just over a gallon of sauce so it has a bit of a kick but nothing overwhelming.
I’ve gotten tired of their whining though and I’ve decided to strike back. I’ll make the pork and sauce it as usual but on the side I’ll put a bottle of my special “shut-up” sauce that people can use or not as they choose. This sauce has a very simple recipe, one small can of chipotle peppers plus enough cider vinegar to equal one quart, blended until smooth and poured into a squirt bottle. Used carefully, this sauce adds a very nice smoky, earthy heat. Used recklessly…, most people only do that once.
I love this hot pepper sauce but it is rather pungently flavored. I also love seeing asshats blowing off the tops of their heads when they say keep demanding spicier dishes.
Is leaving this trap at a pot-luck and evil act? How, if at all, would you label the bottle?
Not evil at all. Label the bottle “STFU” and let them slather it on.
(Odds are at least one of them, like me, will say “Better, but still not hot enough.”
Unless you are breaking out the habaneros, you aren’t even approaching true heat. I eat chipotles out of the can.
I’d slather it on if I liked Jalapenos (I’ve never had a chipotle, I must admit.) Now, if it were an habanero sauce, that’s another story, I like the way they taste even without the heat.
Label it as “hot”, and you’ve satisfied any moral obligations you have. And the more explicit you are as to its heat, the more that the chile heads are going to put on anyway. It would be highly moral, and highly evil (but in a good way), to label it “5 Alarm Hell & Damnation Sauce”, and watch the pepper lovers slather it on.
If I saw that bottle of sauce next to the BBQ pork, I’d probably sprinkle it on generously, on the assumption that it’d be comparable to Tabasco. But if that’s all you put into it, it’s going to be significantly tamer than Tabasco. Jalapenos really aren’t all that hot, especially not when diluted that much (I don’t know how big a “small jar” is, but that sounds like a 3:1 or 4:1 dilution to me). And it’d be liquidy enough that you really couldn’t put on a “too hot” amount of it.
Maybe it’s just the brand of canned peppers that I buy. Maybe I’m just a lightweight. I don’t know. It’s not so much the peppers themselves but the sauce they’re packed in.
It’s plenty of heat for my needs and I’m the chile-head of my family.
Yeah - I like the idea, but disagree with the fact that you can make anything too hot with chipotles. I’d at least mix in some habenero paste to round out both heat and flavor.
Every single time I read this thread title I get a mental image of a woman leaning over a buffet table and accidentally triggering stream of hot sauce pouring itself all over her chest.
Worth a shot maybe but it just seems caddish to me to deliberately make something too spicy for me to eat. It could be I’m at the low end of spice tolerance and that I’m too worried about it.
Even something concentrated like Dave’s Insanity Sauce - something that blows the lid off of 99.9% of the population when taken straight - adds a bearable amount of heat when added in small doses to something that dilutes it. Like you said, this is meant to punish the reckless, not the innocent bystanders trying to get a few endorphines.
Get a very large bottle of hot sauce, any kind, and when someone complains the dish isn’t spicy enough, hit them over the head with the bottle. Repeat as necessary. Then pour some Insanity in their eyes.
+2. Unless you’re putting in habaneros or Scotch Bonnets, the chili heads should still find that “medium” at best. Chipotles aren’t all that hot. Here’s a scale ranking the various peppers according to heat level. Chiptoles score a 4/10.
I make hot pepper jams. I label my jars “really friggin’ hot” because, IME, some people think ketchup is spicy. The people who cannot handle spicy foods are whom I worry about suing me should they tuck into one of my jams and burn their delicate mouth. If the Cayenne-Mango jam isn’t hot enough for you, you can try the Habanero-Blueberry. If the Cayenne-Mango is too hot, you might be okay with the Jalepeno-Pear.
Either way, I’d rather overwarn than underwarn. But that’s to sell a product. For a potluck, I fully support your idea, but I think you should make it crystal clear: set some super-hot sauce aside, carefully labeled so a kid doesn’t think it’s ketchup or something (and the little old ladies who can’t read so well anymore).
It’s one thing to cater to the not-hot-enough people and give them something to bitch about. It’s another thing to put out a decoy sauce for more tender palates to make the mistake of trying.
Oh YEAH? Well, I pop a jalapeno in my mouth and wonder if it was supposed to be spicy!
(Seriously, on vacation a week or so ago I sort of rolled my eyes when the waitress double-warned me about getting my Chicken Strips at Denny’s with the Buffalo Wing sauce. I hadn’t had them since I’ve been eating habaneros, and I literally could barely taste that they were supposed to be spicy.)
It’s really quaint that you think black pepper (in the quantity of 2 TBSP/GAL) can contribute to making something “spicy” and 2 TBSP of crushed red papper flakes gives something “kick.” Are you English, by chance?
