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.

 

I noticed that McDonald’s was doing a cross-promotional item with Hot Ones so I had to try it



If you don’t already know Hot Ones is a popular YouTube series where the host interviews a guest while eating progressively hotter wings. Similarly this 3-pack has 3 different heat levels and the McD app has a game where you answer questions with friends while you get assigned a particular sauce to eat.

Now I just assumed that this also existed in the US & Canada since Hot Ones is far better known there. However searching a bit this seems exclusive to France, which is surprising. Most French people I know think that even black pepper is too spicy and since this is associated with McD I thought the sauces would be tolerable. That was a mistake. These sauces have serious HEAT



This first one, Hell Piñata, was very mild. 1.5/10 spice level. This lulled me into a false sense of security

The second is called Thaï-toi which is a play on “tais-toi”, which is French for “shut up”. Heat level jumped immediately to 7/10 and I was sweating. Totally threw me off

The third is Embrase Moi, which I don’t totally understand but probably refers to red hot coals. 8.8/10 and I needed to eat yogurt afterwards to relieve the pain

I really did not expect this from McD at all

 

why does everywhere else get the cool stuff... and we only get a cheeseburger, cold/soggy fries, and a McRib from McD's???

 

If anyone wants sriracha made from the original peppers before they switched suppliers in 2016, it's these guys:
https://underwoodranches.com/

Backstory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huy_Fong_sriracha#Pepper_supply

 

My brother recently came to visit me from the US and brought both Huy Fong and Underwood for me. I found a local sriracha that’s pretty respectable and I should do a 3-way taste off

 

IMO - the Underwood one is still SLIGHTLY off on the recipe - I don't know what is actually going on behind the scenes, but to me the taste I get is it seems like there may be a bit too much vinegar and not quite enough fermentation or depth of flavor in the peppers. I don't like the new Huy Fong one nearly as much though.

Also agree that ironically the my worst McD experiences are ironically consistently in the US - I only go 1-2x a year for their "normal menu". Breakfast menu is a bit better to me and go about 3-5x a year. Mexico + Canada about the same. Most of Europe and Asia (at least that I've been to) has somewhat to much better McD - to where I don't mind "wasting a travel meal" at McD in a 1-3 week period.

 

I understand some people are (still?) quite upset over the Huy Fong pepper thing. I can taste the difference, but that is about as much thought as I put into it. I basically use it as a substitute for ketchup. I can tell the difference between ketchup brands too but don't lose much sleep over that either. Fortunately there are orders of magnitude more brands of pepper sauce to choose from than ketchup. Unlike sriracha some of them are even hot.

 

Underwood Ranch sriracha is at Costco now (at least by us). I started seeing it in stores about a month ago. Def a step above the Huy Fong.

 

Several years ago I was in NE India visiting some friends and had some homemade chutney made from fire roasted tomatoes, garlic, scallion and what was known as Naga King Chile. The chiles were smoked, dried, and then reconstituted. I loved it so much I brought back some of these smoked Naga King chiles. These were crazy hot and my wife actually ruined some pork carnitas because she thought they were only Red Savina level hot and put 2 whole chiles in with the pork. It was meat lava. I tried growing some plants from the seeds but they wouldn't germinate.

My wife has gotten to know a local Nepalese family through her work and the guy grows "King Chiles" indoor year round. He gave us a bunch of fresh ones and I saved seeds for next Spring so I should be able to grow a perpetual supply. I did try a small sliver of one and it was savage. But it has that nice citrus aroma that you get from Habanero, and these seem to be more manageable once they're dried. I see some potential for hot sauces here.