Every so often, while eating at a Tex-Mex restaurant, I will encounter a food (frequently, salsa) that will contain peppers that don’t just lend a little heat to the dish, they leave a flaming trail of destruction that runs from the tip of my tongue right down to my esaphogus.
It completely destroys any pleasure I might once have had in eating the food. I’m left using whatever tricks I can come up with to put out the fire. My appetite is shot and all I really want to do is get the hell out of the restaurant.
My wife who also likes Mexican and Tex Mex food feels the same way.
So why in HELL would anybody put whatever the hell it is that turns a meal into an ordeal into the food? Do other people have leather esaphogi?
I know some guys take a macho pleasure in seeing how hot of a pepper they can eat without seeking relief. They strike me as the gastronomic equivalent of people you see on America’s Funniest Home Videos doing stunts that involve bicycles, rooftops and wading pools. They can’t be the people that keep Mexican restaurants afloat, can they?
You know, there’s this particular pizza concoction here and there-- at Bear’s in Bloomington it was called “Dante’s Inferno”, for example, which is a yummy pizza involving, among other lovely things, lots of jalapenos.
Now, the whole mouth pain thing I can live with. But, “in fire; out fire.” About 4 in the morning It Begins. Ugh.
AND YET I can not control myself and simply say “no more!” Sunday “pizza ritual” night comes along and . . you know. It’s like a hopeless animalistic compulsion.
We used to joke that we should keep a post-it-note on the back of the bathroom door as a kind of memento mori so we could contemplate our folly:
“‘Damn, this pizza is always so damn good!’
– Capybara, July 19, 6:45 PM”
Tex-Mex is great, but some of us have to learn what to eat. The salsa and the peppers don’t bother me, but I have to avoid the fattier stuff because that brings on pain that lasts for hours.
i read a book by david lieberman called instant analysis where he lists the reasons for 100 or so common activities.
Supposedly eating food that will cause you pain is because your life has so little pleasure in it and so much pain that you have to take any pleasure you can get. The pain afterwards is nothing new.
I love spicy food. Especially if there are margaritas involved.
Theres nothing like being teary-eyed and flush with endorphins while eating a good spicy meal. It just makes you feel good and alive and happy. And nothing is more addictive than good hot salsa. You get in a wonderful vicious cycle where you eat some salsa, and then you need a chip to cool down with, and then you need some salsa because it is just so damn good. The interplay between the sweetness of tomatos and the spicyness of peppers with the saltiness of chips is unbeatable. You can get an extra dimension out of properly spicy food- a very physical dimension. A lot of times I’ll find myself specifically craving spicyness.
Plus I hold the completely unfounded belief that eating spicy food regularly will keep you healthy, maintain general vitality and help you get over illnesses quickly. Don’t ask me why I think this.
And don’t even get me started on yummy spicy Vietnamese food. Or Indian food. Or even a good spicy pasta sauce. I’m already getting hungry.
I like it hot, really hot, but I know of which the OP speaks. There are some people who get a macho kick out of eating unecessarily hot food, and a subset of those who like to inflict it on others. I had one friend who made chili regularly and put so many peppers in it that it was inedible.
As an anecdotal hijack, the hottest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth was some homemade jerk sauce (the real stuff is NOT like BBQ sauce) I had on the east coast of Jamaica (Boston Bay, I think) at a roadside jerk stand. I got the guy to sell me a jar and brought it home. I think the main ingredient is scotch-bonnett peppers. You could literally put a half teaspoon of it in a cup of BBQ sauce, and it would still burn you a new one.
I have to agree with the OP… I like a little spiciness but when I can’t taste anything but fire and I can barely swallow because I’m too busy saying “Ow” it stops being food. (my threshold for this phenomenon is low… somewhere below medium in a curry place)
drinking milk, or eating a spoonfull of yoghurt or sour cream will help against the burning in your mouth.
I’m a bit at a loss, here: you obviously don’t like spicy food, then why eat it?
people who do eat spicy food (like me), generally like it. Now i’ve never had a vindaloo curry, but I’ve had rogan josh and green chilli’s and such, and I really enjoy it.
If I didn’t like spicy food, or the side effects of spicy food, I wouldn’t bother eating it.
This is a constant contention between my husband and me. He calls my coking bland - I like to taste the food and he likes to taste the spices. I guess to him, the food is the vehicle to deliver the spices. Personally, I don’t like peppers or any hot spices.
As for me, about the only time food causes pain is when I get the occasional “ice cream headache”.
I had friends who were Notoriously Bad Cooks. Morning-after food poisoning was not uncommon but we enjoyed their company so we’d stock up on Pepto and go anyway.
One night we went for Chili Night. (Hindsight: shoulda thought this through). So we sit down to eat and one of this evenings participants has recently gotten out of the hospital for bleeding stress induced ulcers. (Hindsight #2: Huh? Chili?)
A few bites into the meal and I notice Mr. Ulcer is pale and sweating profusely even though I can barely see him because my eyes are watering so bad my contacts were threatening to wash away (Or melt). Mr. Ulcer was a consumate gentleman and continued to compliment the cook between tortured bites. Evil Captor was there and enjoying the chili but feeling the pain as well but was the first to point out that Mr. Ulcer didn’t look too good. Nor Terror for that matter.
We 'fessed up that the chili was quite hot so the hostess jumped up and offered us plain keifer. Me, I just got another beer (believing that torture was better than keifer and beer was better than torture).
The Notriously Bad Cook couple also fasted one a week for ‘cleansing purposes’ but I tended to believe it was a healing time for their digestive tracks.
On a related note: I have seen Evil Captor drink soy sauce out of the bottle.
No, I LIKE spicy food. I like curries, even fairly hot ones, most Cajun dishes work just fine for me, and lots of Mexican and Tex Mex cooking works fine. Foods that start with a mild burn but which build to a fierce burn over the course of the meal are OK – I can control that. Heck, at one time I enjoyed eating pickled jalapenos with fried chicken because the chicken counterbalanced the burn of the jalapeno and I like the flavor of jalapenos. I’m not THAT sensitive to heat.
There’s a difference between food that has some heat and what I’m talking about – the peppers that leave a track of burning destruction as they go down.
It seems to me that most of the responses to my OP fall into two categories: I like to hurt, taste isn’t that important, and I like the taste of the stuff that makes pain, and you get acclimated.
I like to eat spicy foods, but eating them often means I’ll be reaching for the Tums about two hours later. While I like my food to have some “kick” to it, I don’t like to eat something that is so spicy that the taste of the food itself is drowned out. There’s also something satisfying about how eating spicy foods can help to clear the sinuses out.