Re: Hot (spicey) foods (Poll)
I love heat...but I like natural heat...and the important part to me is to be able to keep tasting your food.
Heat to me, is scotch bonnets/habaneros. Yet they have to be done tastefully. Caribbean food is one of my loves, especially good...true..authentic Jamaican Jerk seasons...such as Walkers Wood or Graces.
I've entered, and I've won...quite a few hot pepper eating contests. My most recent victory was quite brutal...it came down to a tie between myself and one other guy. The tie breaker was...he and I were each given a plate of scotch bonnet peppers..and whoever could eat the most was the winner. Our mouths and stomachs were already in pain from eating all the peppers of the primary contest (plates of peppers increasing in heat level were brought out 1 by 1) . He stopped at the 3rd scotch bonnet, I was on my 5th when he threw in the towel.
Let me tell you, for serious chile heads...those who enter hot pepper eating contests...people will joke about the "red eye" the next morning (referring to your...butt). It's not that. The real pain is..when you take your first morning pee the next morning. And the next several pees til you flush out your system. It's like someone dragged 25 feet of barbed wire through your urethra..and then poured gasoline down it and lit it on fire.
I have a sick little part of me, when I'm hosting a big cookout..and the subject of hot food comes out..and someone goes out saying "Oh I love hot foods..the hotter...the better..yeah, gimme your hottest sauce!" Knowing what's "hot" to me..and what's "hot to most people"...I'll go retrieve one of my uber hot sauces...and show them was hot is really about. A couple of summers ago I was the cook for a big beach house party over in Rhode Island. There was this "loud" guy that got on my nerves..so loud and obnoxious. I had brought all my supplies for making some of my tropical crab cakes (Lefty knows about these!
) Anyways, he saw my collection of hot sauces which I was using for the cakes and several of the different dipping sauces I was making...and he started going off bragging about how he loved hot sauces..."Yeah..make mine super hot...lets see what you got" he yelled at me. I had a bottle of my hottest stuff with me...and I put on an evil grin, poured a few drops of it in a spoon..and walked over to him, giving him the spoon. He had to pony up, since he was bragging in front of a crowd, and he downed the contents of the spoon in front of everyone. I counted to 10...and started giggling like Jim Carey in the greasy burger joint scene of Dumb and Dumber....and OMG were we all rewarded with the most comical show. His face went up like crazy, and the screams and moans and groans...he went down on the couch for a while..and then outside for a while..probably puking off of the porch.
Anyways, my love of heat....layered flavors of heat, that takes you right up to your limits and a hair over...but not the kind of 1.9 million scoville units scale heat that coats your tongue with nothing but the pepper oil so that you can't taste anything you're eating. There's just no point to that IMO, unless you're being evil against someone.