OK, I’m researching something else relating to China, and I find this aside from the author’s experience with Sichuan hot-pot cuisine (bolding mine):
So, is this even possible, or just literary hyperbole? I find it hard to believe that even the hottest of peppers (or the cauldron they’re in) could heat the ambient air to the point that it would incinerate anything, much less a moving creature.
Definitely hyperbole. The “heat” from peppers isn’t heat at all, it’s capsaicin content. It just feels like burning. Even if we were discussing heat, typical cooking temperatures are far lower than the ignition point of living (or even nonliving) organic material–if they weren’t then what you were cooking would burn up too, being organic and all.
Peppers don’t actually produce any physical heat - they only produce the sensation of heat, because their active ingredient, capsaicin, acts on the heat receptors. So “hot” peppers can’t possibly have anything to do with it.
So when you find flies in the hotpot, the’yre there on purpose?
[Ralph Wiggum]Tastes like burning[RW]
Thanks, Q.E.D. and Colibri. I kinda figured as much, but it never hurts to run it past the experts, eh?
mental note:adjectivify a genus in your subject to get quick SDSAB responses…
You’re too kind. I’d have said “bald-faced lie” unless the oil is boiling at 450 F or something. Which I sincerely doubt.
This is a crock. Having eaten Sichuan hotpot in Sichuan and numerous occaisions, I can say it’s so spicy that I can’t believe anyone eats it. Really. The broth is red from all the peppers, then they dump in whole peppers and ground peppers, and then when it boils down, pour in more pepper water and add (wait for it) more peppers.
It’s really not physically possible to eat. But it won’t make a fly combust. Chinese will eat just about anything, but it is an exaggeration to say they eat flies.
Boy! Talk about turning a bug into a feature!!
Are you channeling Yogi Berra?
Besides the points made above about peppers we can tell the recipe is BS becasue:
Squids don’t have fetuses. They lay masses of eggs like fish, insects, etc., do. http://oceanlink.island.net/ask/mollusca.html#anchor207462
Dropping frozen anything into a pot of boiling oil is very dangerous. There’s inevitably some ice crystals on or near the surface of the object which are flashed to steam in the boiling oil. The result is usually an eruption of boiling oil out of the pot, or at least violent spattering. This can be hard on the chef’s morale, especially night after nght.
Obviously, you’ve never worked in fast food. Almost everything which is deep fried is done so with frozen product. If done properly with the oil at the correct temperature, the spattering is minimal at worst and there is no eruption of oil at all. There is not THAT much water content in frozen foods, unless it has been improperly stored and allowed to accumulate ice on its surface. Even then, it’s somewhat less than spectacular, if a bit noisy.
Dumping a few ice cubes in the vat, on the other hand…