Most of the Indian restaurants here in Oz try to cut back on the ‘hot’ spices and are not as hot as they usually are in the sub continenet. The food at most of the Indian restaurants I’ve been to isn’t ‘hot’ at all, probably 3-4 on a 10 point scale, where 10 is the level which seems to help clears your sinuses up.
Yeah, I’d say you’re missing something if the Indian food you’re getting is “bland.” Without exaggeration, I would say “bland” is the last adjective I would use to describe Indian food. Literally, the absolute last. Indian food is the diametric opposite of bland. As for heat, Indian spicy, to me, is much hotter than Mexican spicy, and the hottest Indian dishes are on par with the hottest Thai dishes, if you’re into that sort of thing (and I generally am game for fiery foods.) If you want it hot, make sure to order something that’s generally spicy (like vindaloo), and be sure to emphasize to your server that you want it hot. Say “Indian spicy” if you need to.
No competent chef or cuisine-creator (imagining such a hypothetical being to exist) has ever said: My cuisine is all about the Scoville units. That would be silly, one-dimensional, and as boring as the hot sauce catalogs that vie with each other to provide the synthetically-derived hot sauces (that no one can eat other than on a dare) with the highest Scoville units.
Indian cuisine, especially some dishes, can be very spicy. I hope that is not the only point. Otherwise I would guzzle a pint of Dick’s Ultra-Scoville Death Sauce, synthesized in his fortress of solitude, and then die.
Indian food is (often) “spiced.” Very well (in good cases), I may add. Daal is not “hot” but has spice (I don’t know if cumin or the other similar-tasting spices make their way into it, but I would not be surprised). But, like all good bean dishes (hopping John, etc.), there is flavor beyond the solid blandness of the beans. And it’s great of course.
Indian food is also sometimes “spicy” (hot). I have eaten vindaloos or phaals that put me in agony. But agony is not the point in its own right – it needs to be agony linked with some taste. And the good ones do balance the heat with sweetness, with creaminess, with the flavor of the underlying meat/veg.
You want hot? Drink synthetic capsaicin extract. Not much fun.
No, I think good Indian food balances all the sweet, hot, savory, creamy, meaty, starchy flavors together, and looks for that blend. Why would anyone care to emphasize one of those six elements exclusively over any other? For the most part, I certainly don’t think the Indians or Indian ex-pats do.
Sure you can get an indifferent curry in Manchester or Derry or Mobile. Or, you may have ordered Rogan Josh not knowing that no one ever intended it to sear your palate. Okay, fine. Find a better restaurant or pick a hotter entree. In the U.K., there’s an excellent curry guide whose name I forget, that gives all sorts of detail as to the specialities of the different shops and often mentions how hot they run.
Oh, and finally, to answer a question someone else asked: IME, Indians don’t tend toward a separate “add-on hot sauce.” The whole “masala” concept seems to mean your flavors (of whatever sort) ought optimally to be part of the cooking process, not spooned on.
Seems to me that Europeans have a different idea of “hot.” I took a couple of Dutch friends to a barbecue restaurant here. The barbecue was very mild to my palate, but these guys wound up chugging water and mopping their brows.
And they were (supposedly) accustomed to eating “spicy” Indonesian food in Amsterdam.
When I visited them in Amsterdam, I had the Indonesian fare and also ate at a Mexican restaurant there (just to see what it would be like) and it was all very mild by American standards.
Quick WAG as to possible contributing factors: beginning in th '80s (???), American junk food began offering at least the possible exposure to real hot spice. Szechuan (or faux versions) became way popular, and you’ll hear plenty of rueful stories of someone’s first chicken kung pao when they innocently crunched into the little red-black pepper. Jalapenos have some heat, and nachos were everyone’s favorite bar food. And probably every American guy I know has at some point been challenged to a “nuclear hot wings” eat-off.
Far as I know, none of that stuff is as widely popular snack food in mainland Europe.
Do you know why at every restaurant at which I’ve ordered hot wings, the regular sauces (mild, medium, hot) usually have a thin, great-tasting base on them, but the “super hot” wings always have a thick, goopy base that tastes horrible? It’s really unappetizing, and would be the main reason why I wouldn’t eat them.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Makes no sense to me – the sauce is AFAIK supposed to be margarine-based no matter what the heat.
Now – were they possibly breading the wings a bit? Gross but does happen.
I don’t like to use wimpy for this. For all I know, they could all be supertasters that are extra sensitive to spices. The elitism attatched to people that prefer spicey food pisses me off to no end. People like what they like and everyone else can fuck off.
I can see where you are coming from, but I don’t think of it as an elitism, rather just a descriptor. Wimpy palate means a person can’t handle very hot foods. It doesn’t make them a lesser person. I myself am really wimpy about horror movies. I can’t handle them. I don’t think that people who can sit through one are better than me, I just accept that I’m a wuss in that particular area.
Missing some taste buds, maybe?() Indian food is freaking delicious. Not always hot, but very flavorful.
() To be clear, I am kidding. De gustibus non disputandum est, and all that. Now the people who don’t like chocolate, they’re just soulless.
I’ve mostly eaten Gujarati-prepared Indian food, and when I say, “Hot”, they ask if I am sure, and then obligingly burn my face off, to my great delight. I’d agree that the style of the restaurant you go to is probably what has kept you from the exquisite spicy agony that Indian food has to offer. Even Indian food that’s not prepared hot has always had an amazing array of spices and flavor for me, so I don’t share your experience with bland Indian food either.
Damn, now I want a samosa.
They spice it lower for your western palate. They think you don’t know what you are askign when yuo ask for it to be spicy so they make it mild when you ask for spicy instead of just bland. Indian food is quite spicy when made properly.
Years ago, a local repetoire theater had a two-month long samurai film fest so for eight weeks, each week, three buddies and I would attend that week’s offering, eating at an Indian restaurant down the block. It was a tiny place with the wife in the kitchen and the husband waiting tables so he got used to us after a couple weeks. We kept ordering the hot curry (among other things) and finally about week six, he asked, “Do you want the really hot curry?”
“Well, um . . .” we temporized, struggling between macho and a sudden fear. He said he’d put it on the side and did. It was quite hot, of the instant damp lip and moving up to your forehead variety. The last two weeks we were split fifty-fifty, so we did without.
The place burned down about six months later (It was the kiln of the ceramic artist upstairs, dammit) and when the building went back up, the restaurant expanded totake up most of the first floor space, was much fancier, and they doubled their prices. Sigh.
The British default is ‘hot’. Why bother using ‘spicy’ to describe the heat of a dish, when it also refers to the spices, if it’s obviously hot (temperature) even if not hot (spicy)?
Lumping all Europeans, and their culinary experiences, into one homogenous group is about as meaningful as doing so with India (plus Pakistan and Bangladesh, of course, the latter being responsible for most of British ‘Indian’ restaurants). I know Brits who would be very similar to your friends, while on the other hand I could direct you to takeaways (Pakistani-run, I think) offering simple chicken kebabs where the marinade alone is at the limit of what I could eat with a modicum of dignity in public.
No, but there’s other sources of capsicum - the chilli sauces dished out by Turkish and Greek-run kebab shops is one.
“Wimpy” is a negative descriptor, as if it were a character issue, a lack of bravery or something. I have a physiological response to really hot food. If it’s really spiced up, it literally burns my mouth, and I get apthous ulcers (other spices do this too, like cinnamon red hots and super sour candies like Warheads). Obviously this diminishes my enjoyment of hot food. I’m not sure how common a phenomenon this is, or if it happens to anyone else. I am not, however, wimpy, since I am pretty adventurous about eating a wide range of different foods. Hot food, not so much. I think the spiciness tends to blot out the other flavors anyway, so I’d rather have a milder heat so I can enjoy the rest of it. Super hot to me means you experience heat + texture and not much else.
I think a lot to do with it is that many people in the US seem to think that black pepper is “hot”, or that Tabasco sauce is particularly “hot” (hint… it’s not!). Add to that a cuisine whose main spices may be black pepper, salt, thyme, oregano and maybe garlic, and you end up with a set of people with a very simple palate.
Anything such as Cajun, Mexican, Indian, or even some Italian things with hot peppers are going to be exotic and considered “hot”. I have a hard time cooking things for others, because I like some fire in my food, and I have a hard time gauging it for anyone besides my wife, best friend and brother, who all like it the same way I do.
I’m one of those people with “wimpy” palates - as a child, I considered BBQ flavored potato chips “too spicy”. I’ve gotten more adventurous regarding my eating habits as I’ve gotten older, and as a result I know what I like and what I don’t like. I don’t particularly like overly hot foods. I like maybe a drop or two of Tabasco or Sriracha sauce (Thai hot sauce) on food, but not much more than that, as I suffer from heartburn and intestinal distress afterward. On one disastrous date, I went to and Indian restaurant where I tried and didn’t like the food, but ate it so as not to seem like a wimp in front of my date, a vegetarian who loved food as hot as he could get it. Needless to say, the date went downhill from there.
Well, maybe, but I’ve seen a lot of Europe, and haven’t encountered any food as spicy (i.e. hot) as what I find here in the US.
Perhaps I’ve missed it.
(And I don’t mean that as any kind of put-down. Just an observation about differing tastes.)
Here’s a question. Where do you rate kim chee on the relative hot-ness of curry?