Explain spicy (HOT) food to me?

Why does nature make this E36 M3 and why do I feel compelled to eat the stuff?

Dear Mother Nature....Talk about fail...The heat failed to protect the plant from predators and the heat failed to protect me from eating this noxious substance.  What were you thinking?

Timing for this post would be because the Carolina Reapers in the garden are ready to pick. 

They are cute little buggers, but pack quite the punch.

Just one of those little berkeleytards has the kick of 8 Scotch bonnets that I normally use to make jerk chicken.

It has been half an hour since I finished putting the chicken thighs in the marinate and I am just starting to breathe normal again after cutting ONE pepper into quarters and scooping the seeds out.  Everytime I do this,  I tell myself to go in the shop and get the charcoal respirator that I use to paint. Maybe I should just keep a can of bear spray in the spice cabinet?

Anyways, for some inexplicable reason I know the chicken will be awesome and looking forward to the BBQ tonight!

Pete

I think it's a case of most sane creatures don't eat them so they can drop their fruit and propagate.  Meanwhile humans said "hey that ain't half bad" and started to breed the plants to make them even hotter.  Because when it come down to it we are all masochists.

I'm with you. The spicier the better. I actually had some hot sauce once that was so hot (advertised as the worlds hottest or some E36 M3) that my body was like lolnope and I puked in the parking lot. It was pretty tasty too. The biggest problem I find is that a lot of the super spicy things have little to no flavor and are extremely bitter and unpleasant. 

I don't get the reapers and so forth. Jalapeños and serranos are tasty, and wouldn't be the same without some heat. But I don't get the stuff that's just 11/10ths on the hotometer...

Or maybe I just don't have the tongue to be able to enjoy them when they're that hot and I'm missing out...

I made an accidental discovery of some Doritos-like chips from Paqui in ghost pepper flavor and mowed down a bag of those last night.  This sounds crazy but when I eat something that hot I swear it feels like I'm starting to buzz.  

wae said:

I made an accidental discovery of some Doritos-like chips from Paqui in ghost pepper flavor and mowed down a bag of those last night.  This sounds crazy but when I eat something that hot I swear it feels like I'm starting to buzz.  

Haunted ghost pepper! I love those chips. If you're really masochistic, mrs renfros makes a ghost pepper cheese that goes really well with those. 

In reply to Ransom :

Actually the Reapers in the right proportions are pretty good. The 8 to one comparo pic is from last year when I made two otherwise identical batches of jerk chicken and let the crowd decide. The reaper won unanimously as the better jerk.

I had a cut in my finger that I was unaware of when I was making the marinade. I am still aware of it an hour later. Gloves, must wear gloves next time.

Spicy food has its appeal, but I have my limits.  Habaneros are hot enough for me.  I am also careful to avoid eating very hot foods in sufficient quantity to "feel it the next day" if you catch my meaning.  That simply put, is NO FUN.

I have a serrano plant outside that's been making more than I can deal with. I have like a quart of homemade hotsauce, a bunch of chopped up peppers in the freezer and have been throwing them at everyone I know. 

 

In reply to Grizz :

I have no idea what to do with this years bumper crop of Reapers and Scorpions.  

I am waiting for my Scorpions to start coming in.  

If you like sweet and spicy try making some sugar cookies with them. 

I use this recipe as a base but i don't do the icing because i don't like icing that much.  Use your own judgement on if you include the seeds or not and how many peppers to use based on your spice preference. 

https://www.teacher-chef.com/2013/10/25/spicy-ghost-cookies/

Some people just aren't as affected by the capsaicin.  I have a friend who is half white, part asian, and part native American.

Normal people might shake some parmesan cheese in their hand before their pizza comes, or eat a sugar packet to get their tummy to shut up until their steak comes.  This girl will straight up eat a spoonful of that red pepper paste at an asian restaurant while waiting for her extra spicy thai green curry to show up.

If I did that, my mouth would be on fire for three hours and I couldn't taste any of my food.  I like spice... like a couple drops of Franks Red Hot on some fried clams, or a 1/4 tsp of cayenne in my dry rub for ribs, or a good mild/medium wing sauce, but anything more than that and my tongue says, "I'm done tasting for the next foreseeable future, and let's throw in some lip swelling, eyes watering, and sweating to remind you of your poor decision making skills."

Anyone into Tibetan/Nepalese cuisine?

They have a pepper they use that instead of burning it makes your mouth numb and tingly.  I went to a Nepalese restaurant and just told the waiter to surprise me because I had no idea what any of it was.  He graciously did like a tasting menu.  One of the things was a sweet vinegar cucumber salad and it was full of shredded chilis.  Instead of being spicy, it made my mouth tingly and numb.  I asked my companion if I was swelling because I was afraid I was allergic to something.

Strange and wonderful experience.

I put too much spice on my food at a restaurant last week (I mean way too much...the first plate wasn't flavorful enough so I tried too hard on the second one...it's a place where you scoop a bunch of meat into a bowl and then have them grill it for you) and I was in severe pain trying to finish it...I don't know why I did except for stubbornness and not wanting to see food thrown away. There's a happy medium for me where I can feel the heat but it doesn't cause extreme discomfort.

I guess it's like salt...some is good, too much is gonna ruin everything.

How many pants were smoked before we found dope? Or...this is a space alien. Nightmare fuel. Tasty, but hell look at this thing:

Appleseed said:

How many pants were smoked before we found dope? Or...this is a space alien. Nightmare fuel. Tasty, but hell look at this thing:

Damn, I'm out of the loop again. We're smoking pants now?!

I love spicy but I don't love pain.

Some people seem to think that just plain hot = spicy but it doesn't.

Indian, Thai, Korean, etc, all good. 

In reply to Mndsm :

Mrs. Renfro's ghost pepper cheese? I could live on cheese Gotta find that. I've just found Mrs. Renfro's Ghost Pepper Salsa. That stuff starts out low but ramps up nicely the more you eat of it. Tasty!

I'm usually disappointed by food advertised as being spicy. So a while back I tried to find the limit of what's hot but still enjoyable, so I ordered some stuff called Mad Dog 357 from Amazon. It's 357,000 scoville heat units. For reference, Tabasco is about 5,000.

Yeah. One tiny dab of that stuff on a chicken wing and I drank what was left of the milk in the fridge, and then ate a tub of yogurt because it was the only dairy left in the house. So it turns out that limit I'm looking for is quite a bit below 357,000 SHU.

And I'm sure in a few minutes someone will tell me 357k isn't that spicy and they drink it as a chaser, etc...

In reply to Shadeux :

Grizz said:

I have a serrano plant outside that's been making more than I can deal with. I have like a quart of homemade hotsauce, a bunch of chopped up peppers in the freezer and have been throwing them at everyone I know. 

 

Hang dry them and fring in a coffee grinder.  I typically only do hot peppers in the garden every three years as I dry most of them and they last a while.

Ooh, I can take this one, both as a pepper lover and a bird lover.

So, birds and peppers have a really unique symbiotic relationship. See, pepper seeds are really soft and fragile, and if a mammal eats a pepper there's every chance that chewing with those big, flat molars with grind up the seed, thus rendering in unusable. And even if the seed survives the chewing, the relatively long digestion process of mammals wil further break down the seed before it poops it out. So mammals make very poor propagators for peppers.

Birds, on teh other hand, don't chew so much. They'll grind up food with their beaks, but just so they can get it down. They don't really masticate the way you or I do. Birds also have very fast digestive systems. Even the slowest digesting birds rarely hold on to food for more than an hour before they poop it out, usually down the back of my shirt just before I go to work. Also, a wild bird that just ate a pepper is most likely to fly somewhere before it poops, thus ensuring more geographicaly diverse propagation as well.

So the key comes with the capsicum content. Mammals are very sensitive to capsicum, so a  mammal that can't help the pepper propagate is likely not going to find it appealing anyway. Birds, on the other hand, are practically immune to the effects. You'll hear some people say that birds don't have capzacin receptors, but they do, they're just "switched off" for the most part.

So, yeah. Nature.

Finished dinner and still have a mild glow from the Reaper Jerk chicken. The vinaigrette bean salad is the perfect compliment the heat. 

Whatever the answer is, I do like me some flavorful hot food.

Pete

Carolina Reapers were bred for medical use of capsaicin. Then some dumbE36 M3 decided to eat them.

I like to compare the IBUs race in India Pale Ales to the hot food trend.

In reply to Brett_Murphy :

Might explain some stuff. I have been a hophead since way back when I owned a brewery in the 90's. I was into monster hops well before this current craze of IPA IBU was a thing.