Belatedly reacting to the "white people don't like spicy food" drivel, who here likes spicy food? I didn't use to like spicy food. I was very sensitive to it and hated any spiciness, be it chili, black, or Sichuan pepper in my food. I would kick up quite a fuss if my food was too hot. And then some time in college I abruptly decided "I'm going to eat all of these jalapenos" because that's the kind of thing you do in college, and now I love spicy food. Well, I like black peppers and chili peppers; never really developed a taste for the numbing stuff or for wasabi/horseradish-based spices. For the heat lovers, what's the hottest thing you eat regularly, and what's the hottest thing you've eaten that you'd be willing to try again? Also, techniques for dealing with the heat when you go over your limit? I've got a bottle of scotch bonnet hot sauce that I've been adding dashes of to everything recently, and some nice dried peppers of unknown type that add a nice kick to stuff that doesn't want a lot of sauce on it. The guys in the math department here get into pepper-eating contests. Well, not so much formal contests as one-off "try a bit of this chili pepper" oneupmanship. There's definitely an element of masochism in addition to the machismo: one of them has this great picture of himself, flushed, sweating and in tears, that he pulls out whenever he's trying to get someone to try one of the hot peppers that he keeps around to test people. As for the hottest thing I've ever had (and would be willing to have again): Spoiler I've had both the Butch T Scorpion and the Carolina Reaper, each a single whole pepper, dried, although I don't know if that makes it better or worse. I personally found them less acutely hot, although still more than I'd be comfortable leaving to sit, and more persistently hot. In each case I had a bottle of milk to clear the spice out but while each swallow would dampen the heat for a moment, it would keep coming back again and again and again. Make for pretty good chili, though.
YESSSSS. I love spicy food! So I am the whitest whitey white bitch you will ever meet. Seriously, I turn into a lobster when exposed to the barest hint of sunlight. I also live in a predominantly Mexican community. My dad grew up in the same community (there's NO ESCAPE) and has an even worse case of BURN THE MOUTH. BURN IT LIKE IT'S DAMNED. (He says: "Culinary weaponization! It's not just tasty, it's a survival skill. Zombie apocalypse, worried about people eating all your grub? Chili time.") I like horseradish, which grows wild as a fucking weed around here so it's always in supply. We eat a lot of jalapenos, which barely even register as hot for me. Wasabi kicks my ass and I love it but eat it sparingly. I LOVE sriracha and put it on everything I can find an excuse to. My dad makes a wicked curry with jalapenos and habaneros but only when the golden curry he buys is cheap. He also makes huge vats of nuclear green salsa. Names for it include "hellfire sauce" and "defcon 5 salsa." Tomatios, a little garlic, tiny bit of white onion, cilantro, sometimes ginger, witches' feet, new mexico/anaheim green chilis, serranos, habaneros, jalapenos, oregano and his Chili Power. His Chili Power is the other thing I eat the most/is seriously hot. Store-bought chili powder + desert tepins, pequins, chipotle, habanero, new mexico chilis, guajillo, morita, chili cascabel, all dried/powdered and blended together. It is wonderful and goes on everything. I put it in my clam chowder and it is love. Soon he'll be getting his hands on some ghost peppers and will be adding that to the Chili Power. I'm looking forward to it :D The best part about my dad's spicy stuff is that he values flavor over heat. It'll still melt your face off, but it won't sear your tastebuds (devil's blood, anyone?) or make your mouth numb. You're supposed to enjoy the pain. (Apologies for any inconsistent spellings and lack of accents, it's 4 in the morning and what is brain.)
I like spice, but I also feel like I'm on the baby end of spice loving, haha. I've never really tried any chili peppers more spicy than Jalapenos, though I've definitely been interested in cooking dragonbreath chili because I am a big fucking WoW nerd even though WoW is quite possibly the worst thing ever. It uses Serranos. It's just really hard to find this sort of stuff in Australia in my experience, though admittedly this might be because I don't really do my own shopping and supermarkets are definitely not the place to find hotter chillis. Hottest thing I eat on the regular is "red hot" (I don't actually know how to rate this, it's just what it's called on the menu) take out Indian food like vindaloo/korma/butter chicken. They're... usually not very hot, though. Probably because the latter two are meant to be hella mild dishes to begin with and honestly, a lot of the other white aussies I know resemble the stereotype, i.e. mild tikka masala is considered too spicy. Who knows! Watching people eat ghost peppers is hilarious, on a related note.
When my father's family came from Romania, they brought their chili con carne recipe with them - and my dad mentioned that at one point, you used the spice to cover up that the meat ain't the freshest thing anymore. Bottom line: When my dad makes chili, it's hot. I grew up with that stuff. My threshold sank since I don't make spicy foods that often since I moved out, but one of my best friends who is a really good cook makes an absolutely delicious curry (that some of the other people in our friend circle can't eat because it's too spicy for them). I absolutely love wasabi ::3 At least the stuff you can get in an asian supermarket, the stuff they sell in the regular chains is bland as fuck. (Seriously, almost everything they warn as "spicy!111!" is usually really mild - unless I get a hold of the person making it and can tell them "your version of spicy, not european spicy, please"). (A classmate of mine boasted, "Wasabi isn't spicy!", and ate a peasized portion of my wasabi raw. His reaction was priceless.) Spiciest thing I ate? Must've been that dish in one of Friedrichshain's indian restaurants. We were warned, it's indian spicy, not european spicy, and we were like, fuck yeah. It burned. It was also delicious. Sadly, when something is advertised as spicy here and it's not bland? It's drenched in vinegar and therefore sour and disgusting. I want chili, damnit, not brandy vinegar! ::< My tactics for alleviating the pain is bread and milk-based products. Rice helps, too.
I am Bolivian. Bolivia is where most capsicum chiles originate from, from a valley in Cochabamba :D Only the Andean regions here really use the spicy, but I grew up eating spicy sauce of llajwa made from locoto/rocoto. We eat stuffed rocoto, but that requires a good amount of preparation. The only time my dad tried to make stuffed rocoto, he didn't wear gloves while chopping/peeling/washing, and ended up spending three days with painfully sensitive and burning hands. Don't manipulate the really spicy peppers without gloves or some sort of protection, folks. I actually lost a lot of my threshold when I moved to NY for college, since so much food there was bland. I haven't really brought it up again, but I still have that masochistic streak in my spices. Give it to me so that my mouth becomes a spout and I'm crying, but I will be happy! On that note, jalapeños don't affect me, so I find those mild, but savory. This means I haven't quite lost my threshold, but considering that my threshold was only a bit lower than my best friend, who happens to be from Mumbai (India), I used to have really high tolerance! Unfortunately, my nose doesn't, it starts sniffling at really small spice provocations, which is ridiculous when eating something I don't find spicy. I miss sriracha from college days, but I love the Bolivian llajwa (here is a recipe for a US adaptation of it), and curry is one of my favourite dishes. We might be white latinos but my mom makes an excellent thai-style curry with coconut milk and lemongrass (I think it is called lemongrass in English <_<;). I don't have any good tricks for dealing with too spicy stuff - downing water and eating bread is what I've done, though I've heard that salt supposedly helps. Oh! I went to visit my cousins in Mexico, and let me tell you, chilaquiles is the stuff of dreams. While we were staying in hotels and travelling, I would order it every morning for breakfast instead of an omelette, and even though my mornings were full of pained aspirations, crying, and red faces, I was so, so happy. My parents were a bit concerned at first, but since then we've learned to make chilaquiles on our own :) SPICY DELIGHT
well, i'm one of those 'milk white boys' from the irish ballads, with rusty hair and freckles and the whole lot. but even though i take after my mom in coloration, i take after my dad in everything else, and that side of the family is czech and kazakh. i suspect that's why i liked spicy food even when i was a wee tiny thing. either that or i just wanted to eat whatever dad was eating, and liked it because it was dad's. i no longer do the "burn my face off i dare you!" macho thing, i have mellowed out into merely liking things spicy enough to have a kick but not so spicy it covers the other flavors of the food. still, my tastes are mad spicy by local standards -- minnesota, american midwest; local food culture is basically what you get when scandinavians and germans move in with ojibwe and lakota, and they spend the long dark winters trading recipes. don't get me wrong, i love wild rice soup with chicken and mushrooms, it is canonically the most comforting winter food on the planet. but it's even better with ginger and thai peppers, right? when i lived in st paul, i ate vietnamese food all the time, and i would often have to explain to someone with limited english that yes, i did understand that dish was spicy, and yes i did want it. i tried not to get snippy about that because i figure the reason they kept double checking is they'd get folks who were used to the minnesota version of spicy, who'd be blown away by the vietnamese version of spicy and complain.
I cannot tolerate anything hot enough to make my eyes water. I like my curry creamy, mild and delicately favored. My mum, on the other hand, is a masochistic heat lover with an iron gut. I love flavor, and being able to taste the spices etc. Idk, I think it might be a sensory overload thing, because if I eat something too hot suddenly my nose is running and my eyes are watering and my tongue and gums are burning. Heat for the sake of heat is not something I enjoy.
So I lived in Nigeria for a while, and Nigerians LOVE their spices. My father brought back this type of pepper once that you only need a half teaspoonful to spice up soup for four people. I can't remember the name anymore, we just call it 'let's use some of that dynamite stuff papa brought home'. Also, Nigerians have pepper soup. It is SUPER spicy, but really great. It's a form of creamy peanut soup with a variety of really spicy peppers in there (wouldn't be surprised if there was ghost pepper in there). And there's a funny story attached to that: My dad often invites his colleagues over for dinner and vice versa. Because of him, my mother met this really snobbish British lady who had an annoying tendency to generalise other cultures and clung to some old Colonial thoughts about Nigeria and India. Not so very nice. They were rather uncomfortable people and papa didn't much like them - but boss of boss and the weird hierarchies in Shell... Anyways, we ended up inviting them over for dinner because it was Our Turn, but my mother REALLY wasn't looking forward to that. So she, in a slightly sadistic fashion, came up with serving pepper soup. In our defense, we HAD asked if they liked spicy, and they assured us that they absolutely loved spicy and the more the better. Challenge accepted. So we served pepper soup that evening, and well... she didn't take too kindly to that. We haven't been invited for dinner anymore. (my mother was devastated though that this lady actually got sick from the spices! She felt really bad about it, but also kind of triumphant? We were pretty happy not having to deal with them anymore on the other hand) Also there was the time I got tricked in Venezuela to eat a ghost pepper. I thought it was like a bell pepper except small! Don't think that anymore now. I'm still kind of a wimp when it comes to spicy, but garlic is my drug, and I do love playing around with curries, cayenne, chili, ginger, and good old-fashioned ground pepper. Indonesian cuisine is the BEST in my opinion when it comes to spicy - they love playing around with different textures and different spicy flavors. 'Rice tables' are awesome because you get to sample all kinds of different tastes together - a little like an all-you-can-eat buffet, but served on your table. The more you order, the better. Favourite snack: rempejek (peanut 'cookies' with cayenne and chili)
i don't enjoy it when my face does that either, it just doesn't seem to do it unless the heat is mouth-numbingly extreme. it's quite possible different people have different physiological responses to capsicum and that's part of the supposed/apparent genetic preference for hot or mild.
@jacktrash All right, so this isn't the pepper soup I had, (there are local variations everywhere) but this website is pretty good for looking at Nigerian cuisine and all the different spices they use: http://www.allnigerianrecipes.com/soups/pepper-soup.html Nigeria has a TON of local spices that are absolutely delicious and totally worth checking out or finding. My mother has the recipe somewhere, so when I go back to the Netherlands I'll ask where she put it. I think she got it from my nanny decades ago.
@Fish butt ooh thank you! that looks fantastic. since recipe trades are polite, here is something pretty close to my wild rice soup recipe: http://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-minnesota-wild-rice-mushroom-soup-recipes-from-the-kitchn-164295 i add crushed ginger and dried dragon pepper along with the garlic, and leftover shredded chicken just before the end so it gets heated up but not boiled tough.
Oh, I completely forgot this even though it is technically a spicy thing that I eat a lot, haha. It just doesn't really register as particularly spicy to me anymore: laksa. It's so good you guys, for real. Curry laksa best food ever.
Oo! Oo! I know this as Laksa Betawi! It's so great! @jacktrash thanks!! I always love checking out new recipes and trying them out. Also I have a sweet load of cooking implements that came from the divorce! (nice thing about getting married are the presents people give you haha.)
I was raised on spicy food and it's pretty much been my love ever since. A good deal of the food I make is Thai too so. Yeah. If the dish itself isn't spicy then I have about five different condiments to use to make it spicy. And you bet your ass it will be spicy. Good proper Thai spicy. CURRIES ARE LIFE. That and khao tom with nam plah prik and chili flakes. OR JUST RAW PEPPERS. Either way. That is the best breakfast.
I tend to like spicy food. Nothing super elaborate, just cayenne pepper or these peppers we used to get called "thai dragon peppers" which are not the same as the bird's eye peppers but those are pretty close. I've never been able to figure out what they are called in a way that allows purchasing them from anywhere but this one oriental grocery in St. Paul.
naw, that's what they're really called. http://www.tradewindsfruit.com/content/thai-dragon.htm order me some seeds and i'll grow them in the dome.
