Poll: Some like it hot

Coffee ramps up the heat sensation of hot food another order of magnitude.

There have been a few times that I met my match with hot food, but I would say I'm in one of the top tiers of enjoying hot food. I have no shortage of Vitamin C, though (chile has more than oranges). My friend who used to be the publisher of Chile Pepper magazine enjoys heat even more than I. He even likes habaneros in his vodka; that's one area where we differ.

The most extreme reaction I ever experienced was tasting an "Atomic Blast" at the Fiery Foods Festival, which was a mixture of two extremely hot sauces from Dave's Insanity Sauce. He had been banned from offering tastes of his hottest sauce, Dave's Insanity Sauce, (I have a bottle of it, which is a capsaicin extract without much flavor; it's just a macho kind of thing, but you'll see God as one victim said), so he devised the tasting of the aforementioned Atomic Blast.

I had to sign a release before I ate some on a chip. Dave informed me it would take about a minute-and-a-half for it to take effect. I stood there, but it was just hot. Big deal. I walked away into the next aisle, and then it hit me. I froze (pun intended). I could feel my face turn bright red. Suddenly my forehead was literally raining sweat. It eventually passed, and now I'm the proud owner of a certificate attesting to my having survived (chest pounding).

Those kind of sauces are for collectors and an area of taste where you and I would agree.

Think I'll jump in with a quick comment. As much as I love and enjoy wine, and that's 100 out of 100, there are dishes and in some cases. cuisines where I wouldn't dream of drinking as IMO, they just don't go with the food. Yes, I too like very hot food like you can get from Indian, Thai, Indonesian or Mexican for example and the beverage of choice is usually beer or with Thai in particular, maybe a chilled rose.
Re individual taste and palates...vive la diffirence!

I'm in the Sriracha camp as my standard level. I'll go to either extreme when it's called for, but I typically prefer almost everything to have at least a little bit of heat.

The hottest thing I can remember eating was a bowl of gumbo one night when I was a bit, ah, into my cups. The gumbo itself was fairly mild, so I wanted to give it some kick. Restaurant had a nice selection of hot sauces and I picked Scorned Woman. I expected that it would have a shaker top like Tabasco. It didn't. Full Bore. Hell indeed hath no fury, for certain.

I tasted some food soem Vietnamese friends had done once and it wasn't taste, it was more a sensation of having tried to swallow molten lead! Youch! I know that one can become acclimated to almost anything - you must customarily eat hotter food than many. Do you ever try to enjoy wine with it - I can't imagine it would be worth the trouble, but hey, what do I know, maybe it is.

Speaking for myself, I have always enjoyed hotter foods. This is not something that happened over time. In fact its the opposite in that I do not eat it nearly as often or as hot as I use to do. When I was a kid, hot sauce went on everything, peppers were eaten raw, and the salsa that I made no one else would touch. It was not some sort of self inflicted punishment or youthful need to show strength. It was what I liked. As noted above I still tend toward the hotter side of things today just not as hot or as often.

What is hot as is clearly pointed out in this thread is different for different folks. Likewise matching wine with hot food becomes then something different for everyone. I don't match my special bottles with a dish full of chili kick. But I do find that there are wines that I like and compliment hotter foods. The obvious is riesling but also cava or other sparkling wines can work well especially if there is a substantial fat element to the dish. I have not found as much luck with red wines. I know folks that like zinfandel with spicier fare but it does not work for me due to the alcohol level of most zins these days. I need to experiment more with Malbec as I think that may work better.

Thanks for stirring the pot, Bill. What you may be overlooking is that we are not all born with the same level of sensitivity to capsaicin. My father shared my own tolerance for hot food, and he grew up in Germany and probably never saw a chili pepper until well into adulthood. My mother, who's very sensitive to capsaicin, never cooked anything spicy, yet when we traveled to Mexico, my dad and I both gravitated to the hotter foods.

I can say with all seriousness that I don't even notice any heat in food until it gets too spicy for many people. I have no trouble getting the complex melange of flavors in even the hottest food found in most Thai restaurants, and I find that a Savenierres or Riesling goes quite well with them (for my tastes). It all comes down to a complex interaction of pain receptors and taste receptors on a neurological level.

As always, de gustibus,
Mark Lipton

p.s. My poll is looking suspiciously like a standard bell curve. What a shock!

Mark, maybe you can confirm or refute my theory that people become accustomed to higher and higher levels of various flavours (some people, anyway) and can build up a tolerance with time and experience?

Mark, maybe you can confirm or refute my theory that people become accustomed to higher and higher levels of various flavours (some people, anyway) and can build up a tolerance with time and experience?

There's the well-documented phenomenon of habituation, which means that any signal to a neuron that occurs frequently and/or intensely will result in a down-regulation of the receptors for that signal. The result is a decreased sensitivity to the signal, which results in the well-known need of drug addicts (including caffeine addicts) for greater and greater doses of their intoxicant to get the same high as earlier. I also know of the same phenomenon at work with our sense of smell, most famously with the smell of rotten eggs. As I've probably related before, the source of that smell (hydrogen sulfide) is every bit as toxic as cyanide; fortunately for us, we detect it as an unpleasant odor at a level far below the levels needed to harm you. However, it is possible to die of hydrogen sulfide poisoning if one is exposed to it at a low level for an hour or two, at which point one can no longer smell it (habituation of olfactory receptors) and can't tell if the concentration in air starts going up.. and up... until it reaches a toxic level. It's like the frog in a pot of water on the stove.

So, it's probably true for other smells and maybe tastes. You'd have to be exposed to high levels of it for a prolonged time, but the result should be a loss of sensitivity. This also accounts for palate fatigue in large-scale tastings and probably for the shift seen in one prominent wine critic's palate preferences over the last decade.

Mark Lipton

Restaurant had a nice selection of hot sauces and I picked Scorned Woman. I expected that it would have a shaker top like Tabasco. It didn't. Full Bore. Hell indeed hath no fury, for certain.

Great Scott! This really did make me LOL!

Mark, maybe you can confirm or refute my theory that people become accustomed to higher and higher levels of various flavours (some people, anyway) and can build up a tolerance with time and experience?

There's the well-documented phenomenon of habituation, which means that any signal to a neuron that occurs frequently and/or intensely will result in a down-regulation of the receptors for that signal. The result is a decreased sensitivity to the signal, which results in the well-known need of drug addicts (including caffeine addicts) for greater and greater doses of their intoxicant to get the same high as earlier. I also know of the same phenomenon at work with our sense of smell, most famously with the smell of rotten eggs. As I've probably related before, the source of that smell (hydrogen sulfide) is every bit as toxic as cyanide; fortunately for us, we detect it as an unpleasant odor at a level far below the levels needed to harm you. However, it is possible to die of hydrogen sulfide poisoning if one is exposed to it at a low level for an hour or two, at which point one can no longer smell it (habituation of olfactory receptors) and can't tell if the concentration in air starts going up.. and up... until it reaches a toxic level. It's like the frog in a pot of water on the stove.

So, it's probably true for other smells and maybe tastes. You'd have to be exposed to high levels of it for a prolonged time, but the result should be a loss of sensitivity. This also accounts for palate fatigue in large-scale tastings and probably for the shift seen in one prominent wine critic's palate preferences over the last decade.

Do we call that Phat Tongue? Gob Mouth? Limbaughitis?

Mark Lipton