MentalPolyphonics
You ain't gotta be in jail to be doin' time.
December 9, 2006 at 7:20 pm
From experimenting with hot salsas, to hot-salsa-plus-additive-sauces, to my first, halting experiences with fresh habeñero chillies and popping salted jalapeños straight, I’m something of a hotness fan. Back in Nova Scotia Dave once commented that I go through salsa like most people go through milk.
The hottest thing I ever put in my mouth that wasn’t actually on fire was a bell pepper stuffed with burned habeñeros that a Mexican made me once at Lil’s house. I couldn’t sleep because of the smell, and when I asked what the heck he was making he gave me an unforgettable breakfast.
Let me put it this way: after I attempt a suicide-hot dish at the Noodle Box I can still walk. Not so with this breakfast.
Peppers, like most living things, don’t want to be eaten. Some mutation in an ancestor of the Capsicum genus caused the plant’s descendants to produce a chemical compound that, not to put too fine a point on it, does bad things to mammals. A seemingly-perfect defense.
But the unfortunate plant didn’t realize the subconscious masochistic undercurrent in the psyche of one mammal: the mammal that would eventually organize and industrialize. This was a fatal mistake. That undercurrent leads us to consume these plants, in spite of their evolutionary efforts, in unprecedented numbers.
Aside from its uses as a pesticide and agent of non-lethal force, capsaicin, the chemical pepper plants produce, is a very popular food additive. It’s chemically similar to tarantula venom, and might have some surprising health benefits. I works by tricking your nerves into thinking they are on fire. Nice.
The hotness of a pepper is measured on a scale called “the Scoville scale“, after its creator. The scale was originally based on the perceptions of a panel of judges as extracts of peppers were successively diluted more and more in some spice-neutral medium. The hotter the test pepper the more perceptible it was even at micro-parts-per-million concentrations.
The Scoville scale has since been refined to take advantage of advances in modern technology. It now uses chromatography, which is the same technique used to determine the composition of other hot things, like distant stars.
The baseline of the scale, zero, is a typical bell pepper. As one progresses up the scale one moves from natural peppers, through some of the milder hot sauces, to genetic-hybrid peppers. Then we move on to some of the hottest hot sauces, and peppers that were genetic outliers — one-in-a-million shots that someone bit into unexpectedly before being rushed to hospital.
Past those, over the 750,000 Scoville heat unit (SHU) mark, we move into the realm of food additives. “Dilute X drops in Y gallons” type products. Things that only the mentally deficient claim to enjoy torturing themselves with. Things that restaurants buy one bottle of every few years.
In the highest reaches of the scale food additives blur into novelty items. Limited-run concoctions that are sealed with wax to keep the air in your house breathable. Things you buy for the bottle art. Things you would only ever try in the presence of a physician, or camera crew.
Capsaicin is hydrophobic, and so hot sauces are suspensions of the chemical and other flavours in oil — made the same way as perfume. At the apex of the scale — by definition — is chemically pure, pharmaceutical-grade capsaicin. Unlike other scale entries, in oil suspensions, it comes in powder form because adding anything to it would decrease its hotness. It is the hottest thing known to mankind.
You pay more for pure cap. crystals than you would for the same weight of cocaine. It is far more dangerous.
The bottles the crystals come in are specially designed to make accidental spills unlikely. It is recommended that you use tweasers and wear rubber gloves to remove single crystals for dilution in large volumes of whatever you want to try it with. Direct-tissue contact can cause chemical burns. If you get it in your eyes you will go blind.
Pure capsaicin crystals register 16,000,000 SHU. Reguar Tabasco sauce is about 2,000 HSU — a mind-boggling eight thousand times less hot.
On Wednesday Chris and I went out for Mexican food. The proprietor sold us a gift pack of “some of the hottest sauces that exist”. We broke one open last night with Zirul. The hot sauce flogger was wrong, and we were grateful.
We diluted one teaspoon in one 473ml jar of Old Dutch Mild Salsa — we were looking for a reasonably pure dilution medium, but still wanted the salsa taste. Hydrophobia is the quality whereby a chemical is repelled from masses of water. As I have mentioned capsaicin is hydrophobic, and so the bottles of water we had on-hand as a safety precaution did nothing.
When you’re suffering from capsaicin heat, as I was, you must remember two things: oils will help (not water), and for bad cases you shouldn’t really swallow the oil after you’ve impregnated it, not unless you want the heat showing up in other, less accessible, parts of your digestive system. The best plan is probably to rinse your mouth out with whole milk, cream, or olive oil.
I’m interested in seeing how far I can take this habit. The sauce that I tried last night was “only” 50,000 SHU, about 25 times hotter than Tabasco sauce. The Hot Sauce Blog seemed to like it.
At the very least, I’ll go through salsa a lot slower now.
Jared
Some evolutionary biologist once speculated that deciduous trees in New England were being selected for colourful leaf pigments. Similarly, production of Capsicum still gives peppers an advantage because we aid their reproduction by farming them. (Their genes care not for freedom.)
PS: You’re nuts.
Jack
Re: PS: You’re nuts.
If ingesting weaponized capsaicin doesn’t appeal to you it’s probably for the best that you spent the day at Science World
MentalPolyphonics.com :: Baptism and Fire
on December 12, 2006 at 10:50 pm
[...] After my experience with hot sauce this weekend something has changed. The weaker sauces in the superhot gift pack don’t hurt — I can drink them out of the bottle. [...]