The Spice of Life – Hot Sauce, Salsa, etc.

Got 12 kinds of samyang spicy ramen. Hochi the chicken is doing what some might say is cultural appropriation on some of these packs, but oh well.
Trying the mala now.

 

Carbonara is my favorite, leaning towards the rice cake variants

 

I wasnt a big fan of that one, it was OK, but I didnt think it was the best.

Here are my impressions so far

Regular 1x Spicy Hot: This is some spicy ramen. Pretty good, I like the flavor, and the spice.
Carbonara: Maybe a bit less spicy than regular due to the creamy sauce. Interesting with the creamy slight cheesyness.
Jenjang: Maybe one of my favorites, intersting korean black bean paste. Probably about the same spicyness as regular
Curry: Pretty good curry flavor, maybe a bit less spicy than regular. Not one of my favorites though
Mala: interesting flavor, aparently a chinese thing. I like the black pepper flavor. Another one of my favorites. Almost as spicy as the 2x, this is packing some serious heat.
2x Spicy hot: This ramen is hot. Very hot. Some pain in eating it, but I still eat it and enjoy, just some pain.
3x Spicy hot: This ramen is pain. Very hot. I still ate a whole bowl but my face was red and sweating for the next half hour. Tasty, but very very very hot. Good to try, but I feel no need to buy it again (and I still have 2 more packets)

 

Red and sweating is good training!

I remember when I first ate a raw jalapeño and thought it was very hot. At the time I was only used to the pickled kind you get on nachos and burgers.

Now those don't phase me much. I'm really liking stuff made with ghost peppers. They have heat and excellent flavor.

 

Yeah, I like really spicy food, but the 3x is really really really spicy. Apparently 13000 scoville

 

Heh, every now and then Torchy's Tacos has their 1 000 000 Scoville tacos available. Those are fun!

Torchy's might not have any stores in New England though. Really tasty queso there.

 

What exactly is scoville? Is it basically the total amount of capsaicin in something? Like if I use half a habanero is that half the scoville rating? When they say a hot sauce is a million scoville, is that the whole bottle?

Example of what I am thinking; i have a recipe that wants a 10k scoville pepper and I have a 50k scoville pepper. Can I use 1/5 of a pepper for the same amount of heat?

 

There's a whole page on Wikipedia, but basically it's the last name of a researcher.

We need a new scale that provides better comparisons for hotter peppers.

 

The Significantly Spicy hummus from Aldi has great flavor, and yeah, some heat!

 

I love Samyang 2x spicy ramen, a nice kick but still flavoursome. I normally add sliced onions and shredded cabbage when boiling the noodles.

I'm a bit of a spice freak in general, my wife is Indonesian-Chinese and an expert cook so we tend to eat more SE Asian food than British. Most of the food we eat isn't that spicy but some of the curries and sauces have quite a heat hit. And I love Indian (or more accurately, Anglo-Indian which is rather different from truly Indian food), a good jalfrezi, madras or vindaloo is always a pleasure.

In terms of table sauces I'm a fan of Lingham's sauces, a Malaysian brand of table sauces which are excellent. And wasabi peas are my favourite snack.

 

Yesterday I saw a new contender at the grocery store, Mrs. Renfro's Carolina Reaper salsa, so I bought it to taste test against my favorite, Mrs. Renfro's Ghost Pepper salsa.

They made the reaper salsa sweeter, and with not as much garlic profile. I think it'd go great in chili (the meaty kind) and other recipes. The ghost pepper salsa is hotter on my palate, and still reigns as my favorite salsa.

My wife has climbed the salsa ladder and now likes to mix the El Fenix (a N. TX. restaurant chain) stuff we get at the store with the ghost pepper salsa; she can't take the ghost straight yet. But I'll bet she's gonna like this reaper salsa and will be able to eat it straight. (I'm proud of her, she having grown up a NJ yankee ).

 

I'm going to amend my post above, a little bit, about the Reaper salsa. The recipe apparently makes it creep up on you a bit. If you eat it as a bowl of salsa with some chips (as opposed to a couple of bites in a taste test), it starts getting warmer on the tongue. But the real thing affected by the reaper has been my stomach.

So those peppers are hot, just not as hot on the tongue as the Ghost salsa, at first. It builds. I don't like the sweetness and flavor as much, so I won't be eating much of it at a time. Maybe that's the strategy to keep people from over-consuming a really hot pepper.