It says something about my interests that of the three friends who gave me Christmas presents this year,
two of them gave me multiple types of dried chili peppers and crushed chili powders. My yearning for heat, it seems, has gone from a preference to a definitional aspect of my personality. Insight into my addiction -- and mounting medical evidence suggests that it is exactly that -- comes from this
Economist article. The key is capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers. The body reacts to it as an antagonist: The pulse speeds, the sweat glands open, the tear ducts kick into gear. Then the body relaxes. Endorphins spill into our system. We achieve a slight high. And like with any other high, repeated exposure increase tolerance. Recipes of yesteryear call for a small pinch of pepper. Newer models suggest you slice up a jalapeno. And many of us go rather further than that. But to go further than that, we need more capsaicin.
Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, recently added a new pepper to its vegetable shelves: the Dorset naga. Inhaling its vapour makes your nose tingle. Touching it is painful; cooks are advised to wear gloves. It is the only food product that Tesco will not sell to children. By the standards of other chilies, it is astronomically hot. On the commonly used Scoville scale (based on dilution in sugar syrup to the point that the capsaicin becomes no longer noticeable to the taster) it rates 1.6m units, close to the 2m score of pepper spray used in riot control. The pepper that previously counted as the world’s hottest, the Bhut Jolokia grown by the Chile Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University, scored just over 1m. That in turn displaced a chili grown by the Indian Defence Research Laboratory in Tezpur, which scored a mere 855,000. The hottest habanero chilies score a wimpy 577,000.
Get that? it has replaced a pepper grown by a
defense research laboratory. I want. That said, it's always worth remembering that "spicy" and "hot" are not the same. Something can be hot without being spicy. It can have heat with no taste. That might ease your need for a fix, but it's not very satisfying.(Via
Ben Miller, who not only gave me this article, but a bag of chiles, a bag of sichuan peppercorns, a bag of pink peppercorns, and various other tongue scorching gifts. Thanks Ben! Image used under a CC license from
CMBellman.)
