I just watched a few minutes of a show on one of the food networks on TV. The host was in a restaurant that specializes in a pasta dish that features the hottest peppers on the planet. Lots of footage of people eating the dish, crying, in obvious agony. Fluids pouring out of their eyes and noses. Drinking water to try to reduce their pain. The restaurant gives them creamy popsicles which apparently help people recover from the inflammation of their mouth tissues.
I’ve been a psychologist for 30 years, and there are still aspects of human behavior that are totally mystifying to me. Why do people do this? Pay money for a dish which they know is going to cause them to be miserable. Surely that kind of heat in a dish makes it impossible to really taste anything pleasant. I mean, I like seasoning and a bit of heat in a dish, but what’s the appeal of this kind of thing? Is it anything other than a bunch of people just clowning around with each other? Sort of a macho, can-I-endure this kind of thing? Should a meal be an endurance contest?
I thought that eating hot peppers released endorphines.
Still, I can’t enjoy anything hotter than Thai peppers.
Some say eating hot peppers is an addiction. The rush you get after holding one on your tongue is likely due to your body’s protective response. “Chewing a hot pepper can release endorphins centrally and on the tongue,” says Dr. Hirsch. Why? To reduce pain, of course.
Endorphin factor: 1 to 3, depending on how hot you can stand 'em.
As someone who enjoys hot peppers, which I get from Tomato Growers Supply Co. BTW, I find they have to be in the right dish to be truly appreciated. I should mention neither water nor beer will help sooth the heat either. My personal tolerance level tops out at about 350,000 on the Scoville Scale, but I also eat hot peppers, cayenne or jalapenos just about everyday so acclimatization likely accounts for that level. Some of the folks in my seed exchange group have much more tolerance than I. My wife is just slightly less tolerant and my mother at 96 can handle up to Pablanos which are relatively mild but make great Chile Rellenos. I also throw a few roasted Pablanos in our New Mexico Green Chile to spice it up a bit.
Absolutely. I was going to compare eating hot dishes to running. Many people don’t understand how a person could possibly enjoy running, but millions of people do. Some psychologists attribute it to the runner’s high. I like running, and I like chiles, too. The best endorphin high I ever got was from a batch of lamb vindaloo that I asked the proprietor to make “native.” I was so compromised from it that my wife had to drive home.
I’ll go a bit further and say that eating the hottest thing you can possibly eat is akin to running a marathon. It’s not something I’d want to do every day, but it’s a blast every so often. Some native Central American tribe has a word for someone who’s eaten a whole habanero pepper, “chilero.” When I found this out, I just had to try. I had a habanero plant, but lived in a basement apartment, so it didn’t get enough sun. It made one pepper, into which it evidently put every molecule of capsaicin that it could possibly make. I set myself up with beer, yogurt, bread, saltines, probably a few other things. I popped it in my mouth, and everything was okay for about five seconds. Then the world literally went orange, and stars started shooting through my vision. I got the thing chewed up and swallowed, then started trying all of the potential remedies, none of which worked. I found that if I kept a mouthful of water with an ice cube, that helped the mouth, but my lips were still killing me. So I stood over the sink for the next five minutes dribbling ice water through my lips. I’ve done the habanero thing several times since, but it’s never been like that again.
Recovery from a scorching hot meal is also much quicker than from a marathon. If you choose your peppers right, there’s really no recovery time. (Habaneros don’t burn on the way out.) Even the worst peppers will only stick with you for a day, whereas for me recovery from a marathon takes 4-7 days.
I canned about 10 quarts of habs this summer. I’ll be making hot sauce to go in my family’s Christmas baskets this weekend. Habs, vinegar, water, and salt – simple but it really doesn’t get any better.
That’s really a guess based on the habaneros we grow which could be lower or even higher. The worst pepper burn I ever got was from mishandling jalapenos while we were canning them.
When I run out of fresh peppers in a few weeks I will buy serranos for things like guacamole as I think the jalapenos sold in the stores around here are way too mild. In guacamole even my mother can handle fresh serranos, if she ate a fresh whole serrano pepper by itself I’m sure she’d be very uncomfortable or worse for some time. In the right dish she hardly notices it.
Habanero tomato marmalade on cheese waffles, that’s good stuff.
Been to Sconnievill myself. Went back to Minnesota the first chance I got. Couldn’t imagine being there 350,000 times.
As to the topic, if you have black pepper on your table, ask yourself why. All things in moderation, sweet, sour, salt and other. I am sure we have all been dared to subject ourselves to one, but many of us decide we have been there, done that, and understand when the levels stop being balanced by what should be a pleasure.
I eat spicy food, well beyond which most in Minnesota can tolerate, but I cannot take salt. I have seen people put salt on pizza. Explain to me what people will eat for pleasure and I can explain the other side.
Given the numbers of those in the world who at best have little to eat, a big part of me finds that sort of thing obscene, and says no. Same thing with those Man vs. Food shows. Big thumbs-down. I’ll get off my soapbox, now.
I had three fresh habaneros I needed to get rid of but I wasn’t about to struggle with my meal over it. So I took out all the vanes, knowing that that that’s where most of the heat is, and the seeds - because they’re bitter and they get between your teeth, so what’s the point of 'em? - julienned the flesh (what little there was of it, habaneros being thin-walled), and made scrambled eggs. Having full knowledge of habanero potency in sauces, I steeled myself, but was surprised at how mild the result turned out: all the apricotty flavor with just a warm glow and none of the pain.
I like spicy food, but also don’t get the point of really killer hot peppers.
I did have one endorphin inducing hot meal once at New World Home Cooking in Saugerties (near Woodstock) NY. This is a fantastic, eclectic restaurant if you’re ever in the area.
They rate the hotness of many of their dishes and you can request most(all?) of them made to your taste or tolerance. They make simply amazing jerked chicken which I’ve always had right around the middle of the hotness scale. One time I ordered it at a 7 instead of my usual 5. This was VERY hot to my taste-- not just naked heat though. It went along with a complex, rich flavor spectrum. It literally got me sweating and about halfway through the meal I noticed a definite euphoric feeling far in excess of what I’d expect from the single pint of beer I was enjoying along with the food. I must say it was enjoyable. Not sure I’d want to endure the heat to achieve it again though. A second pint would be easier and perhaps equally enjoyable
I have limited tolerance for hot. I like it more than I used to. I don’t long for the experience Chas described.
Only slightly related, lately I’ve taken to actually eating the ripe olives on my Greek salad at Zoë’s Kitchen (it’s a “fast casual” eatery.)
It shocks my mouth a little, the extreme brininess. I’ve never cared for olives, but I seem to enjoy tweaking my taste buds more than I used to. Maybe the next step is to dare to try hotter peppers.
We serve pineapple juice, and or pear slices along with hot spicy dishes at our house. Both coat the tongue and immediately eliminate the burn and swelling from the hot spices. Beer and water are useless for this purpose, though the beer gets served anyway, especially on burrito night.
Myself and a couple of guys were talking to a teacher and she mentioned pulling the leaves off of a bitter plant and mixing it with the equivalent of a whole chickadee to boil as meatballs for soup.
James said “I wouldn’t eat that if I was starving”
She said “I was”
Okay it wasn’t a “joke”, but I remember the silence that followed like a great silent nothingness of the world looking at three stupid boys and one lady that was stronger than we’d ever be.
I like Mark Zimmern. He really seems to enjoy food and tries to make social stigma of "ick" go away of what is good food elsewhere. _Man vs. Food_ ? Let him eat Army mess hall for a month. Not some generals quarters that took the guy that made us eat well, but real mess food. Stuff himself all he wants, he just eats massive amounts of good food.
I can make it all the way into the 100-900 range but 1 or 2 pepperoncinis is really my limit. I make hot wings, which puts me way up in the 3000 range but I only use a little.
I’ve thought about this, mostly when I see those “competitive eating” contests. But, then, when you think about it, just about everything about the way Westerners eat is, you know, problematic.
There’s a small trend among some restaurants where the customer not only chooses the level of spiciness (this is not news), but if the very hottest is chosen even after warnings, a waiver is jocularly trotted out for the diner to sign. I recently heard about a local joint where such customers are further warned that if they complain, cry, stop eating, or otherwise show weakness, they will be subject to not only their companions’ derision and contempt, but that of the staff as well. You could say it’s a sub-genre of dinner theater, only the heat-eater is the heart of the show.
I suppose it could be argued that in sport eating, the contender’s stoopings to excess are balanced by the punishment of great physical discomfort. Only easy prosperity could allow us to regularly indulge in such pastimes in the first place, so I guess one must apply the notion of balance as best as one can find it.
Back on the soapbox: There are few things that continually bother me, but this is one of them. To put it bluntly, I find myself ashamed for my society whenever I witness it, and it’s why I can’t even watch such shows on TV; the trailers are sufficiently grotesque enough. If ever anyone’s been with hardly a penny to their name and daily survival is cause for unending anxiety, they’ll understand my misgivings. But I guess it’s for me to work that out.
The first and and only time I had umeboshi at a restaurant I wished someone had warned me. Now I’m completely soured to the idea of ever trying it again.
Definitely an acquired taste. I never acquired it and umeboshi would fall under “foods to endure”, for me, but it’s probably helpful to remember that the various forms of preserved ume are thought of more as the equivalent of a vitamin pill, a tonic and digestive, the proverbial “apple a day”, than something you eat for the pleasure of it. It goes without saying that they are eaten sparingly, and it is not due to stinginess but rather mercy, I suppose, that in a hinomaru bentō you get only one:
I will confirm that in my own experience they are indeed surprisingly good for hangover, but for that you still have to eat them, which is like eating a squishy salt block soaked in vinegar and any fruitlike flavor reduced to a ghost that takes distant backseat. “Harsh” might be a fitting word to describe them. And then after the puckery work of enduring one you’re left with the additional work of having to find a graceful way to get rid of the pit. From Wiki: “Umeboshi were notorious for their ability to eat their way through the plain drawn aluminum lunch boxes commonly used in the 1960s. The combination of organic acids and salt in the umeboshi were the cause of this phenomenon.”
IIRC, the first time I had one, my reaction was cause for great hilarity among my Japanese friends. To this day I can leave umeboshi alone just fine.
so yer not perfect after all 
