Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Hot peppers can be deadly to people who are not used to spicy food. I bought a few raw habañeros a few weeks ago. I have cooked with jalapeño and serrano's but never habañero. Wow! Just a thin slice was hot beyond description. My wife is hyper-sensitive to spicy food. I was so certain these things were dangerous to her that I threw them away after using a couple to cook with. Here it is in numbers [0].

I can see the potential for fumes from the manufacture of hot sauces being irritating a lot of people. Sriracha isn't particularly hot. If you really want to try hot buy a bottle of Dave's Insanity. BE VERY CAREFUL IF YOU DO. They ask that you use it one drop at a time. Believe me, that is good advice.

Those not into hot sauces don't believe that these sauces actually have taste. And sauces such as Dave's and Sriracha taste really good. There are many sauces that just burn. I don't know many hot sauce afficionado's who enjoy sauces devoid of taste.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale

Peppers are particularly difficult to cook with. Their oils are what is spicy, so you get variations based on growing conditions as well as how you prepare it. To reduce spiciness, remove all seeds, rinse with cold water and put it in a cold salt water bath for a couple of hours. Not enough to change the flavor, but just until you start to see the oils collect on the surface. This only works with raw peppers. If you then lightly sear the outside, you can get more of the flavor without the spiciness getting into the rest of the food as much. With the right sized pieces, you can then pull out the spicy chunks and still have the nice flavor.

> To reduce spiciness, remove all seeds, rinse with cold water and put it in a cold salt water bath for a couple of hours.

This is popular opinion, but I've also heard from cooks that the seeds don't contain much spiciness in them, but the pulp around them does. Could it be that the outsides of the seeds are covered in oil and the insides are actually neutral?

I was once surprised by a burger in Vegas that had a sauce made from Ghost Peppers[1], also known as Bhut Jolokia, which is about twice as potent as habanero, but feels far more painful.

On the scoville scale, the ghost pepper sits very near the top, with a rating of ~1 million scoville units, which sits comfortably above the average consumer-grade pepper spray. Eating it ... tastes like pepper spray.

That said, since then, I've decided to build up a tolerance to it. I've always enjoyed spicy foods, and the spicier the better, but the ghost pepper has proven to be a tough nut to crack, as I've yet to get past using it in fairly small amounts in flake form.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_chili

Good luck building up tolerance; I found it to be a lot easier than I thought it might be. I was given a few Ghost Pepper seeds in the Spring and prior to the last Fall harvest I worked up to a tolerance of about two tablespoons of chopped peppers. However, like any tolerance, once you do this 'lesser' peppers such as habanero cease to have much impact.

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