My tolerance has increased significantly over years.
I grow the Trinidad scorpion chilies and I can vouch for them being bloody hot and also vouch for after you’ve cutting them up, scrub your hands before going to the toilet, (and I mean scrub)
A slice of dried Carolina reaper however was the hottest thing I ever ate. My eyes watered, my sinuses cleared and all i could do for about 5 minutes was focus on breathing slowly until the heat subsided.
Not so much “eaten” as “tasted”:
Somebody gave a friend of mine a bottle of Dave’s Total Insanity hot sauce. He offered me a taste. I dipped a toothpick into the bottle, shook off the excess, and touched it to my tongue …
I thought my heart had stopped. I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds. I like hot and spicy, but that was too damned much.
That’s actually the mildest of the Dave’s Insanity series, clocking in at around cayenne pepper level. Perhaps you just meant the regular Dave’s Insanity Sauce?Dave’s regular insanity sauce is about as hot as I like my hot sauces, clocking in at 180,000 Scoville, like a reasonably hot habanero. It’s the only extract based sauce that I’ve actually found I enjoy. But that’s the one I see dispensed with a toothpick to folks who haven’t had it before.
I’ve accidentally sprayed myself with a girlfriend’s roommate’s mace while playing around with it. Yes, I am mostly idiot. That was mighty spicy.
The closest I have come to that while dining is my brother having drunken noodle at a local thai place. My brother was a regular there. His idea of what constitutes spicy is somewhere what I consider “dare” level of spiciness, and it took awhile before they would give him what he wanted. It took him emphasizing that he would want it to be five stars spicy to someone from Thailand. When they brought his dish to the table, my eyes would tear up a little. I dunno if they spiced my dishes due to association with this maniac, but that was always the spiciest three-star thai food I ever ate. My head is beginning to sweat a little now just thinking of it. Deliciousness.
The most painful experience I’ve had from spice was from having a bite of my father’s “Million Dollar Beef” at a silly/nice Chinese restaurant when I was 14 or so. I’d had it before, and it was tasty. But it contained whole, dried cayenne peppers. This time, I proceeded to chew one of them thoroughly with my back molars, and had a painful earache for about four hours. That was actually much worse than spraying myself in the face with mace. The mace didn’t hurt as much, and was tolerable in less than an hour.
On the pleasant level of painful for myself, my aunt Anita’s chili recipe was perfect. It was an all-pepper/onions/meat/masa affair. It called for 5-8 dried, crushed cayenne peppers and a whole box of Gebhart’s chili powder, among other spices, for a 3-4 quart batch. Eating it fresh the first day, it would make one’s eyes water on the first bite, (the above mentioned brother would cry and whimper while eating it as a child, we’re conditioned animals.) To eat a full bowl without tortillas on the first day was a silly idea. Upon a day of mellowing in the fridge, it was the perfect chili.
ETA: As a life-long consumer of spice: you people consuming these weapon-level sauces with no starch, sugar, or protein medium to moderate the stuff might as well be spraying yourselves with mace. I’ve done that, no thanks.
Full habanero in one bit. I guess their specific level of heat can vary quite a bit, but I was hating my life. Gargling whole milk and spitting it down the sink. Horrible diarrhea the next day too.
I think I read the blazing wings at BWW are a couple hundred thousand? The habanero was worse.