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Comment by PheonixPharts | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> 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

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.

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.

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've found a strong correlation between heat and flavor

Capsaicin is a preservative [1].

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

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

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?

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