Now that’s what I’m talking about! If a spicy dish doesn’t clear out your sinuses, it isn’t spicy enough!
Never mind the wife, never ever ever touch your little brother either, you will squirm for a bit.
This is a good point. I like some spicy foods, but not at the expense of flavor. Sometimes things are so spicy that you cannot taste anything else, which can ruin a good dish.
Now, I’ll eat a plate of hot wings and enjoy them, but I sweat, Lord, do I perspire. That’s about my limit, though.
Try some of this if your palate veers towards numb (its the spiciest, hottest shit known to man…I’ve seen grown men reduced to tears by this stuff): Pure Cap, 2oz.
It’s no joke. Stuff is dangerous.
When I’m in the mood for spicy, I want really, really spicy. However, heat is not a replacement for flavor.
I also love to order the spiciest things on the menu. I was introduced to Sichuan hot pot a couple years ago when I traveled to Beijing. After that, I realized that anything called “Szechuan” at most American Chinese restaurants is a complete travesty. There is an authentic Sichuan restaurant (Lao Szechuan) in Chicago’s Chinatown that I’ve been to a couple of times for their hot pot, which is very good.
At Thai restaurants, I always order the maximum spice level, but it’s always pretty damn mild to me. The other night at California Pizza Kitchen, however, I finally met my match. I ordered the Thai chicken pizza extra spicy, and I had to throw in the towel after only three slices. I ate two more the next day and the last slice the day after that.
That webpage says the sauce is 500,000 Scoville units, the Naga Jolokia pepper mentioned in the poll is over twice that (Or it can be anyway, I imagine like any pepper it depends on genetics and growing conditions). I do kinda wonder if it matters past a certain point, if you’re already in excruciating pain can it really double it?
If you’re hellbent on chasing that spicy hot dream, you can get pure capsaicin crystal here. In the review on that page the guy uses a crystal about the size of a kosher salt grain and ends up having to throw out a whole pot of soup because it’s too hot. It’s mostly a collector’s item, I think actually eating it goes well past the point of dickwaving and into the realm of deeply stupid.
I find that serranos have the perfect mix of flavor and heat. Ideally, you need to add several types for the perfect chili bouquet. I will eat habanyeros, but they taste soapy to me. My MIL got me a nice peri-peri hot sauce in kenya.
Okay, you guys have fun waving your dicks around with your Naga Jolokia’d hands. I’ll wait.
I guess I’m bitter because I’ve reached my limit on spicy foods, not because my mouth can’t handle it, but because if I eat anything hotter than jalapeno level, it feels like my stomach lining is being eaten away. The tiniest bit of raw onion has the same effect. Any tips for getting over the hump?
Speaking of bitterness, I also have a problem with certain hot sauces in that they just get bitter and nasty in large doses. It tastes like the mild bitterness of a cooked green bell pepper. Tabasco is the worst about this.
I’ve found my tolerance for spicy is increasing as I get older. I don’t know if it’s something biological going on (losing my sense of taste?) or I’m building up a tolerance the same way you do for alcohol, so I need more spice to feel the heat. I started off putting a teensy drop of Tapatio on whatever I was eating, now I cover my beans or my eggs with the stuff so you can hardly see them. I also seem to have an iron stomach. People complain about heartburn, indigestion, or unpleasantness on the way out after eating spicy food. That has never happened to me, even if the food was intolerably spicy.
However, I can’t brag too much because I know a three-year-old girl who has me beat times one hundred. I watched her wolf down three bowls of posole verde and then beg for more. Her mother offered me a bowl, and I could barely get down more than a few bites, delicious though it was. My eyes and nose were streaming and afterwards I was literally exhausted. I figured the spiciness cause an adrenaline rush and then a crash.
Absolutely concur. Jalapenos have no flavor whatsoever as far as I can tell–habeneros at least have some. (My favorites are Thai peppers–less spicy than habaneros, but very tasty!)
I put habaneros in the poll, mainly because I’ve never tried anything spicier. I’d be interested in trying something–but Naga Jolokia’s, as described, quite frankly frighten me.
Youtube’s full of videos of people eating nagas by the way. Some are funny.
This guy (Col. Assumption is the Mother of all Fuckups), from Steven Seagal’s Under Siege 2: Dark Territory sprayed pepper spray mace into his mouth as a breath freshner and had some witty retort to tolerence after being sprayed with it… don’t know the exact quote- Anybody know? I wonder if this is true … he claimed a immunity from tolerence to the peppers? Be a an excellent myth to see Adam, Jamie, Tory, Kari, and Grant bust.
Penn: Not mace, sweetheart. Pepper spray. Sold to civilians.
[snatches canister from Sarah]
Penn: But once you get used to it…
[sprays some into his mouth]
Penn: …it just clears the sinuses!
Mmmmmmmmmm. Underage Katherine Heigl. Naughtylicious.
I’ve done both. I suffered far more from an unhappy wife.
In our home we might only use 4 or 5 bottles of sauce in a year. We never put bottled sauces on tacos as an example. What you didn’t take into consideration is that Americans don’t make many homemade sauces, in fact they consider one type of sauce, salsa while we generally consume freshly made salsas of a large variety on a daily basis.
I can’t even handle Pace mild salsa!
I hate black pepper too. It tastes like wood chips.
Heavy on the Jalapeno or light on the Serrano for me, but it’s got to be tasty as well, just heat doesn’t cut it.
There used to be a shop on the River Walk in New Orleans (it may still be there) that sold over 500 brands of hot sauce. From what I could tell, a lot of them were for bragging purposes only. My favorite label was for “Boudreaux’s Butt Burner” sauce.
Yeah, that’s the one I’m keeping on my kitchen table.
Ah, yes. Butt burn. It’s never been so bad that it’s painful, but I do have to chuckle ‘Oh, yeah. Pa naeng.’
I’ve never been served food that was too spicy to enjoy, but I’ll admit the that it may be possible, in theory.
I like an “internal sauna session” once in a while. I think it’s good for you to sweat from time to time, and I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t break a good sweat as frequently as I figure I ought to from simple exertion.