The spice must flow

The journey continues

II had gotten divorced from my first wife in 1987 and two years later married a woman from South Korea who I met while in San Antonio, Texas.

We lived in an apartment complex five minutes from my work. Close enough that I could come home for lunch, which I did on occasion.

One day I came home for lunch, she had prepared a bowl of Ramen soup, but added extra stuff in it to make it better. There was egg and what looked like very thinly slice bits of carrots. If you read my last article, you might guess where this is going.

Let’s take a step back and talk about the scoville heat unit (SHU) scale.

For the uninitiated, the SHU rates the heat level from the capsicum, the oils a pepper creates to cause the heat you experience. Originally it was a subjective test, determining how much dilution of sugar water was needed before you could no longer feel any heat. Later it went technical, using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).

The scale is from zero (A bell pepper) to the millions (your ghost peppers, carolina reapers, etc).

The Jalapeno, my first experience with hot, is rated at about 1,500 to 2,500. Peppers can wildly vary in heat, especially when you start getting into the 100,000+ range.

The first truly purposely created hot pepper is widely recognized as the Bhut Jolokia, also known as the Ghost Pepper. It was specifically cultivated over 100s of years to become hotter, and was the first to reach 1,000,000+ SHU. It was this pepper that started the extreme heat arms race in the 1990s and 2000s and still going today. Eating challenges started to become popular around the country. Videos on youtube are made. An entire industry evolved out of it. New peppers are created in labs/green houses specifically to make the hottest peppers possible, like the carolina reapers. Store shelves are stocked with all sorts of hot sauces and salsas standing next to those little bottles of Tabasco (SHU of 2,500 to 5,000) that used to stand alone.

So, getting back to my lunch.

It looked great, and I was pretty hungry, so I took a heaping load of noodles and carrots and shoved it into my mouth.

Let me introduce you to the Thai Pepper.

These dainty little peppers are hiding a terrible secret. Their Scoville rating is anywhere between 50,000 and 10,000+. That’s right, orders of magnitude hotter than that now wimpy Jalapeno. I ate what I thought were carrots but were instead these buggers. These are snot creating, sweat flowing monsters. My face turned red. I couldn’t breathe. Hiccups ensued.

After what seemed an eternity (probably about 5 minutes) I asked her what she put in the soup. She told me a couple Thai peppers. I asked her how many was a couple. She said six. She honestly didn’t know they were that bad. Or so she claimed. You never know what lurks in the heart of a woman.

In 1990 I was assigned to do a tour in South Korea. This is where I started to explore hotter foods and where things started to get crazy.

Was there a starting point you can look back on and say that was when I started to love <whatever> cuisine that was outside of your normal daily dining experiences?