Chili Peppers
A recent story in London's Telegraph told the sad tale of a fellow in Edlington, Doncaster, who accepted a bet to make a chili so hot no one could eat it. Thirty-three-year-old Andrew Lee won the bet – he was apparently the only person who could eat it. Unfortunately, he suffered a cardiac arrest and died the next morning, with only the chili to blame as he had recently been given a clean bill health.
Now, I’ve never eat a dish so spicy that I’ve had to call the paramedics. But I have come close. I like to think of myself as a tough guy with a stomach of galvanized aluminum, the kind of stomach you could put all sorts of bad news into without needing to drink a Brioschi afterward.
For those who feel the need for some real science, let me explain that hot peppers, chiles and the like are hot because of the presence of an alkaloid called capsaicin, a bitter compound with the formula C18H27NO3. The net effect of all those letters and numbers is an extreme irritant, which literally burns the skin. (Rub a hot pepper on your hand and within a few minutes you'll feel a burning sensation and your skin will redden – in scientific jargon, the effect of the alkaloid is rubefacient and hyperaemic).
Nutritionally, peppers are surprisingly good for us – they contain reasonable quantities of vitamins A, B and E, and lots of C (pound for pound, hot red peppers contain more than 10 times as much vitamin C as oranges). Eaten in moderation, they're said to aid digestion. Eaten in excess, they become a challenge to the human spirit.
It’s possible that the hottest dish I’ve come upon was a creation called Spicy With Spicy, which was served at a four-table hole-in-the-wall in the SoCal (San Gabriel Valley to be exact) that vanished many years ago. But the memory of that dish has never faded; I think I can still taste it, in the way that nightmares recur in Stephen King novels.
It actually should have been called Spicy With Spicy and More Spicy. It was basically a pile of peppers, that allegedly included pork, though it could have been almost anything for the pork was buried beneath an avalanche of peppers fresh and peppers dried, peppers pickled and peppers fermented.
There was a lot of salt in there too, though it's hard to say – my mouth went into vapor lock after the first bite. I could no longer taste anything; it completely froze my tastebuds. Which was a pity – I hadn't yet finished the last of the peanuts with anchovies. Technically I was alive. But my mouth was dead. And it stayed that way for days.
If Spicy With Spicy seems a bit hardcore for you, consider the life-changing pepper dishes at Chung King, a small storefront on the unfashionable southside of Garvey in Monterey Park, CA. The most popular dish at the restaurant seems to be Chung King–style hot chopped chicken, a plate that seems to appear on virtually every table. It’s so devastatingly hot that to eat more than a mouthful is fool hardy. Like Spicy With Spicy, it can lead to a total shutdown of the ability to taste anything.
What I found was that mixing the chicken with rice, about one part chicken to 10 of rice, created a dish that radiated heat, but was at least manageable. In general, the trick to eating at Chung King is to mix the intensely spiced dishes (which, based on the little pepper icons on the menu, are about 90% of the choices), with the handful of milder dishes – or at least with the pepper icon dishes that are less fiery than the hot chopped chicken. On the less incendiary side of things, there's the cold chopped chicken with spicy sauce, the braised bean curd casserole, the wonderful celery with ginger sauce, the cucumber in garlic sauce, the Chung King–flavored noodles, any of the soups and any of the crisp rice-crust dishes (essentially sizzling rice).
And then, there are the items listed under the headings of "Dishes with Sichuan Pickled Peppers" and "Boiled Dishes in Hot Sauce." The boiled sliced chicken in hot sauce sounds reasonable enough – but the sauce cut deep into my consciousness, a startling hotness, a dish that made me gasp with pleasure and pain. Pickling seems to quadruple the intensity of the peppers, which may or may not be an illusion.
What's not an illusion is that pickling increases the sodium considerably, making this one of the saltiest dishes I've ever tasted – even carefully separating the stir-fried fish, the sliced beef and the eel from the peppers didn't reduce the salt and spice – these peppers are that powerful. It's constantly overwhelming. It's like music played at its maximum volume; sooner or later, you long for peace and quiet. Which is why a big bowl of ice cream isn’t just a pleasant dessert; it’s an essential remedy for the peppers that ail you.
– Merrill Shindler