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Comment by squokko | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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