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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Less spicy is actually good. I prefer more flavorful chiles, with less spice. Mark Miller's conversation with Tyler Cowen is good on this subject: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/mark-miller/.

Chiles are actually fruits and, combined judiciously, create a lot of complex flavors. Excess spiciness overwhelms the flavor. And people who want absurdly spicy peppers, can get them: ghost chiles, carolina reapers, and so on.

"Flavor > heat" in other words.

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> I prefer more flavorful chiles, with less spice.

As someone with a fairly high spice tolerance, I've found a strong correlation between heat and flavor. I think anyone coming from a culture that eats spicy food will agree.

I had a batch of habaneros I grew last summer that were both the most spicy habaneros I've had, and by far the most flavorful. I've also had some very tasty ghost peppers (when used in moderation). Outside of peppers that are inherently not spicy, such as pablanos, heat and flavor seem to coincide.

All of the most flavorful chili dishes I've had in my life have all been quite spicy, and I can't recall any mild chili dishes I've had with nearly the same punch.

The only time I've seen heat and flavor not connected is in terrible hot sauces which aim to be shockingly spices that make use of capsaicin extract.

As someone who also prefers the taste that comes along with spice, best reasoning I have heard is folks who don’t like spice cannot even taste the flavor that comes with it, so they associate milder peppers as tasting better. I.e. when you are screaming for water you don’t stop to consider the flavor (or you may not even taste it at all as your brain tells you to go into flight mode).

Yep, I literally can't taste food if it's past a certain level of spiciness. I have had hot sauces that friends insisted were incredibly distinctive but I could not even tell apart.

Yes, I think you're right. When I eat something that's too spicy for me, I can't taste anything. My tongue is numb and feels like it's burning. It doesn't even have to get to the level of screaming for water; I can power through eating it even if it's spicy enough to where my tongue feels numb, but it's not pleasant, and I don't taste anything. I wouldn't even say that I "don't like spice," as spicy food can taste good, but if it gets too spicy I can't taste anything.

Yep, for me less numb just every further bite of food feels like eating fire.

Your palate has been desensitized and can only taste flavor with heat. Spend 2 months with zero capsaicin and it will reset.

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I enjoy plenty of non-spicy foods, and don't need every meal to be spicy, nor to I think that the only flavorful meals are spicy meals.

My point is exclusively with chili peppers, as the spice increases so does the flavor. I didn't grow up eating spicy food, and my experience has been that as my spice tolerance has grown overtime I have found access to increasingly wonderful flavors that are simply not present at lower spice levels.

That's interesting, I am curious if it's the capsaicin itself you're tasting directly.

I know I've had hot sauces that were just heat without any kind of real flavor. It's not that I couldn't taste it. I could, I just didn't want any more of it.

Capsaicin itself is boring. Frankly, I think it tastes rather metallic.

Hot sauces that add it to boost their "spiciness" ratings taste awful as a result. The flavor of it stands out, and not in a good way

Capsaicin is a terpene and probably enhances other terpenes. The metal taste of pure capsaicin is probably from extraction process

I don't think so, ghost peppers have a very rich flavor to me.

Habaneros have a sweet flavor that accompany their spice.

Serranos have a very distinct flavor as well.

Each pepper has a flavor that comes with the spice, and yeah the more spicy the pepper they more rich the flavor generally.

It could be quite possible that for a given pepper, the variables that increase the capsaicin also increase the flavor compounds. It is possible to separate out the flavor, I remember reading about Grant Achatz experimenting with it, but you need a rotary evaporator to pull it off.

Dave Arnold has also done it with a rotovap, specifically with habanero. Because he wanted all the bright flavors of habanero, without the heat.

That isn't how it works, flavor sensitivity is orthogonal to heat sensitivity.

Being desensitized to heat does not desensitize you to flavor. Because of a correlation between heat and flavor diversity in peppers, people desensitized to the heat can taste the more complex range of flavors available in peppers.

There it is! It only took about a dozen posts to attract a fan of the recent trendiness in ultra hot peppers to state that heat lovers have superior taste.

I never stated any such thing nor am I a fan of ultra-hot peppers, but you sure seem insecure about it. What I did state is not controversial. Self-selecting expertise in the qualities of food applies to a great many things we eat. It doesn't have anything to do with "superior taste".

Anyone can learn to eat peppers, most people choose not to. Could swap out peppers for a very long list of other foods and it would still make sense.

> Your palate has been desensitized

I could imagine this.

> can only taste flavor with heat

This doesn't make much sense. Can you elaborate on how this effect would work?

It certainly trends that way, but I'm not sure it's a sure correlation. Hatch chiles are flavorful, but not really spicy. Scotch Bonnets are probably among the most flavorful, while I find the much hotter Ghost pepper not to taste like much.

Yeah I think this logic only holds true for individual peppers within one species (or batches of peppers, or even regional variants of peppers). The hotter ones also have more flavor.

If you're comparing two different species of plant though I think all bets are off. If a correlation exists here it's very loose.

Habaneros taste like pineapple to me. They're absolutely delicious.

...for 30 seconds, and then I

1. Wish I was dead

2. Ask for another

> As someone with a fairly high spice tolerance, I've found a strong correlation between heat and flavor. I think anyone coming from a culture that eats spicy food will agree.

I couldn't agree more. I grow a variety of chili plants on my balcony each year, from the Jalapeno (red and green) all the way to the Morugas and the Bhut Jolokias, with some varieties in between such as Chiltepins and Scotch Bonnet peppers. I think the Habanero is my go-to for most dishes - they're hot enough without being as insanely hot as the ones at the upper end of the scoville scale. That being said, I've enough experience now to know how much of which to put in each dish, and my freezer is full off pods from previous harvests.

I can't cook without chilis, garlic and onions. Nor can I sleep when either of those ingredients are missing. I get cold sweats just imagining that the next pandemic or apocalypse might be around the corner and I'm ill-prepared in terms of the three essential ingredients for surviving comfortably.

I cultivate all three of those on my balcony. They are all extremely forgiving plants.

Chillies are easy to grow and produce a lot of fruit. Fun.

habanero garlic onion is the holiest of the trinities. throw in some cayanne and its so good the gods will favor your well being over most

In my opinion, habaneros have the best flavor out of any chili. Once you get hotter than that, they don't really get more flavorful. I've tasted Carolina Reapers a few times, and they just had this grassy vibe that wasn't very appealing. The very hot ones don't seem bred for flavor, just record-breaking heat.

Habaneros and Scotch Bonnets can have absolutely amazing pepper flavor: sweet, fruity and aromatic. The bell peppers I've had weren't even close.

Alas, I don't maintain the heat tolerance to eat them.

+1. I almost mentioned Scotch bonnets, too. They're another excellent chili.

I don't think the correlation exists so much as it's been created by co-selection in many varieties. Consider many of the smaller, more ornamental, chile varieties: they're often quite spicy, but lack good flavor because they have an almost grassy solvent note in the background of their flavor profile.

That said, I get the hiccups (involuntary) when spice level exceeds a certain threshold, so I'd love if the flavor could be improved while keeping the spice level below my hiccup threshold.

> I've found a strong correlation between heat and flavor

Capsaicin is a preservative [1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34751073/

I occasionally go through OCD cooking phases and I went through one after reading the cook book "Sauces" (https://www.amazon.com/Sauces-Classical-Contemporary-Sauce-M...). There's a throwaway sentence in the book that refers to chiles, and the sauces made with them ("salsa" means sauce) not being fully appreciated. This led me down the path of "fruit purees as salsa" and I spent a fair amount of time working with chiles and regular peppers.

I definitely agree, I find that once the spiciness exceeds some level I simply don't enjoy the flavor the food. But when the spiciness is below that threshold, I absolutely love the flavor of pureed peppers. You can definitely tell all the different chiles apart, some are quite earthy, others are sweet fruits (habanero), other taste like raisins to me (pasilla).

I really wish we could have a habanero that is 1/4 as spicy. I LOVE the flavor of habaneros but their spiciness prevents me from putting too much.

That said on the flavor/spiciness scale a lot of the Chinese varieties are excellent. The chili peppers used in Sichuanese cuisine are actually not that spicy compared to habaneros or Thai chilis, which allows it to be possible to dump a bag full into a dish and it gives it a LOT of rich flavor.

I was in Jamaica a couple of months ago and they use habanero peppers a lot and I was astonished by how much I loved the flavour. I never buy them because I always assumed they were too spicy but you don’t need much for great flavour. I also hear what you’re saying and I’d be tempted to agree, but I wonder if the flavour would be negatively affected by the reduction in heat.

When using hot peppers I remove some of, or all, of the seeds and pith. You can greatly control the amount of heat this way since the seeds and pith have the most concentrated capsaicin.

Maybe habanero is too potent for that strategy but it works well on jalapeno, serrano, and whatever they grow in Hatch, NM.

(and it should be obvious but wear disposable gloves if you do this, unless you want the worst wank of your life).

I also remove the membrane on the flesh too.

Capsaicin dissolves in alcohol, so I tend to wipe everything down with 70% IPA minimum with a paper towel before sending it into the dish washer.

70% IPA? That’s a serious beer

Sounds delicious, if a bit punchy.

Actual conversation I had last week with my daughter: "Dad, did you cook something spicy in the skillet" (I have a cast iron skillet and normally am the only person who uses it)

"Yes, I made a sauce from chilis that was much too spicy, and used the skillet to cook the sauce down".

"Well, can you let me know next time, because I just made very spicy bacon!"

I normally only wipe down my cast iron skillet rather than cleaning it, and I think the metal is porous (even after seasoned), because I could still get a hint of spice on my finger from touching the cast iron surface.

Oil supposedly also dissolves capsaicin.

Maybe put a half a cup to a cup of evoo and warm up the oil, swirling it around next time? Then you can let it cool down and maybe use this to solidify the oil?

https://www.amazon.com/FryAway-DF413/dp/B09CRN1MM1

That would also mean you wouldn't need to season your pan again.

Don't season your pan with EVOO, its smoke point is too low.

Avocado oil works well for seasoning.

What does smoke point have to do with it?

What you want is a high iodine value. Both avocado and olive oil have low iodine values, and they’re premium oils, so doubly wasteful for cast iron seasoning.

I think the idea is the higher the smoke point the easier it is to bring the oil to a high temperature to get it to polymerize. I don't know if this is true, as my pan came preseasoned and then I mainly add to that by carbonizing previous bits.

I don't think the surface is porous so much as you didn't clean the pan and left capsaicin behind in it. You could try this with other materials - can you eliminate all the spice from stainless or glass without using soap as a surfactant?

It's fine to wash cast iron with soap, and when you're working with spicy things and others use the pan, you really ought to consider it. Even if you don't usually wash your pan.

Isopropyl alcohol is a really bad idea for food. I'd suggest a drinkable alcohol instead, like a vodka or something.

Yeah, I'm not that worried after it goes into the dishwasher.

The real issue is to get as much as the capsaicin off the cutting board, knife, hands, etc, before it goes into the dish washer.

Oh, I see, I misread and thought you were using it to reduce the heat before cooking with it.

Though now I have an idea -- dunk habaneros in vodka for 30 mins before cooking with it.

Check out the habanada, can’t say it’s perfect, but it is a habanero bred for flavor and low/no heat

There is a variety of habanero developed in Oregon that look just like a regular one but have almost no heat. Unfortunately they don’t have the same fruity flavor or tartness as typical habaneros, or really much flavor at all.

One of the best unique beers I've ever had was a Jalapeno ale. The yeast had metabolized all the capsaicin, so there was zero spice. The Jalapeno flavor was crisp and clean, and you could taste a depth of flavor that was normally overshadowed by the heat. It made me appreciate peppers more now that I knew what to taste for. I've been meaning to try and recreate it and then work my way through various peppers/chilies.

Wait, does yeast break down capsaicin? That doesn’t make sense to me since I make a lot of extremely spicy fermented, hot sauces, and they don’t lose their heat.

With water and salt? That should be lactic acid fermentation by bacteria, no?

Could be, it is open air for atleast an hour or two so it could be either, especially since I faintly smell alcohol sometimes. Does adding salt always mean lacto bacillus?

I don't buy it either. I've had tons of chile beers and they are typically spicy. I once made a habanero stout and that thing was undrinkably spicy for years.

There was a habanero watermelon beer out of NZ that was pretty good. Real crisp, cool, watermelon flavor up front, pretty fruity in the middle... then the heat hits. You want to cool it down then you take another sip and it repeats.

The way commercially packaged jalapenos are now is closer to no-heat than low heat. You could swap them with chopped bell peppers and most people probably wouldn't notice the difference (and many like my father would still complain that the dish is too spicy.)

Particularly the chopped and canned/jarred jalapenos; I used to buy them for pizzas and chilis but they're just not worth it anymore.

> Less spicy is actually good. I prefer more flavorful chiles, with less spice.

Then buy a poblano instead of a jalapeño and leave the jalapeños alone?

The problem isn't just that they have less heat. Anything which becomes "industrial" loses all of the characteristics that "industrial" doesn't select for.

This includes spice, flavor, juiciness, nutrition, scent, etc.

I've never smoked. If my first time was with the most expensive Cuban cigar, all I will feel is the smoke , I'll cough, and I won't enjoy it.

When you build up tolerance for spice, you are in a position to enjoy the beautiful and little known flavors that hot chiles offer

this is the way. ideally building up your spice ferocity with real peppers. dont get me wrong i did my time w ridiculous extract sauces (even before hot ones craze, smile) but its just not the same

> Less spicy is actually good. I prefer more flavorful chiles, with less spice.

Two problems with this idea as applies to the article. First, it's hard to separate the two in breeding (many of the most flavorful chiles, far more so than jalepenos, are pretty hot).

Second, industrial production optimizing for a lot of things: shipability, stability, shelf life, consistent size/appearance, in this case consistent capsicum ... most of these are considered more important than flavor according to revealed preference. Consider the current "standard tomato”. Round, dense, deep red, mostly flavorless.

So unfortunately you're likely to end up with a jalapeno that is more consistent, less hot, but also less flavorful - but looks good in the grocery.

The gist of that article is using the correct chiles for whatever your purpose is, ie mulatos over anchos for mole vs simply making everything weaker and accepting less heat overall.

Very, very neat talk though

I don't know, I don't find jalapeños to be all that flavorful. Sure, adding some add some spice and some flavor. But it seems both are just mild.

Flavor is heat (mostly) when it comes to peppers.

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