As I write this, I’m eating, for breakfast, a parfait made with (among other things) close to a tablespoon of cayenne pepper and 11 hearty shakes of 650,000 Scoville unit jolokia pepper hot sauce. (The cayenne pepper hits quick. As soon as it hits the tongue. The jolokia peppers take a bit before the heat starts. So, I like to balance the two.)
Last night I made a 7-layer bean dip also with cayenne and the same hot sauce. The day before that, egg salad with… you guessed it: cayenne and jolokia hot sauce. Most of what I eat, I add really spicy stuff to it.
AMA!
Have you had success communicating to restaurants just how spicy you want your food? Got any tips?
Unfortunately, I almost never eat out. And when I do, I’m too lazy (ok, probably more like social anxious) to try to get them to customize anything. Also, when I eat out, I order take out or DoorDash and eat at home, so occasionally I’ll add spice to what I’ve ordered after I get home.
I love super salad! But mostly soup.
Do you even taste anything else anymore?
Ha! I don’t feel like I have any deficit in tasting, really. I do love strong flavors other than spicy, though. Bitter, sour, that kind of stuff. I dunno! I suppose it’s possible I’m compensating for some deficit in my gustatory sense.
I mostly ask because chilli is more like an allergic reaction than a flavour. I can handle a good level of heat, but if it’s the level where your lips feel like they’re on fire if they touch the sauce then I definitely can’t taste anything else going on. I mostly just get medium-hot Indian food nowadays.
Do you have any tips for handling both stomach and exit pain? I always find that to be the tricky part.
My story is that I used to have severely painful stomach issues daily. With or without spicy food. (Though spicy stuff would definitely exacerbate it.) Doctors couldn’t really help me with it. I got a diagnosis of IBS, but that didn’t really do me any good.
Then a friend of mine got me into healthier eating habits and I did an elimination diet that lead me to the root of the issue: sugar. I’ve got a violent sensitivity to sugar. Apples, for instance, are well sweet enough to destroy my whole life as long as I continue eating them. The only reason I didn’t realize it was sugar before then was because I ate it so regularly and never tried quitting it. (Also, it takes a few days of sugar consumption to cause me issues, and then a few days of abstaining for the symptoms to subside, so I’d have had to go off of sugar for several days before I figured out the issue was sugar.)
(Full disclosure, there might have been other things that contributed to my IBS. For instance, I haven’t had grains to speak of since about the time I quit sugar and haven’t tried grains since, really, so I don’t know if reintroducing grains would bring back symptoms.)
Since I quit eating sugar almost entirely (my rule is “nothing sweeter than a tomato”), spicy food is almost never an issue for me. No stomach or intestinal pain. No pain in the bathroom. I definitely have a sensation of warmth in my stomach (which, honestly, is pretty pleasant) after eating spicy food, but it takes a lot of super spicy food for a long period of time to give me anything approaching what I’d classify as a “symptom”. (And when that does happen, I just back off for a few days before hitting it hard again. Lol. And by “back off”, I don’t mean zero spice. Like half-to-two-thirds as much spice is more than sufficient.)
So!
To answer your question directly, if it were me, and mind you this is just based on my own experiences in my life, it might be worthwhile to try an elimination diet like The Whole 30. Go super strict on it, at least for the duration of the experiment and see what it does to you. In my case, I didn’t have to try spicy food to know it was improving my wellbeing. (And who knows. Maybe you’ll have positive results without trying spicy food.) But it probably wouldn’t hurt anything to try something super spicy right about at the end of your experiment.
(And, full disclosure again, I didn’t do the Whole 30 exactly. But my diet is pretty similar to the Whole 30 today and has been more-or-less so for the last 20 years.)
I’m not everybody, just me. So I don’t know if there are people out there who can’t tolerate spicy stuff even if the rest of their diet aligns with their particular sensitivities. But in my case, the only thing keeping me from eating spicy food was the severe reactions I was having to other stuff. YMMV, but if you decide to try something like this out, good luck! And if not, good luck anyway!
To add to this, I eat a fair amount of sugar and stupid spicy stuff with minimal impact to my stomach or any exit issues
Wow! Thanks for such a great reply!
I used to have stomach issues in uni when I was eating a lot more bread. I never really did anything about it, but it seems to have died down now as my diet naturally changed. I’d never heard of an elimination diet before so that makes sense to narrow down exactly what’s causing it.
It’s really fascinating how the same combinations of food can affect people in such different ways.
I always find this interesting - spicy stuff doesn’t bother my stomach or on exit, but it bothers some siblings.
I’m fascinated why this is.
Similar thing: cinnamon bothers my stomach and when my stomach is already upset, ginger fixes it. Also, cinnamon with ginger doesn’t bother me at all.
Meanwhile, my mother can’t tolerate ginger and cinnamon settles her stomach. Weird stuff.
(Also, if you wonder, she’s a spicy-food lightweight. Heh.)
What’s your favorite hot sauces?
For heat I’m partial to Smokin’ Ed’s Special Reserve and Tabasco Scorpion but I usually mix them with milder sauces to get a flavor profile. Tabasco Scorpion is kind of sweet so I’ll pair it with something like Local Honey’s Mango Habanero. Smokin’ Ed’s is neutral but hot af so I’ll pair it with anything that tastes good but needs more heat - like Mexico Lindo for Mexican or Conch Republic’s Fire Coral for seafood.
I think my favorite for just straight flavor is Baron West Indian Hot Sauce. A friend of mine came back from a Caribbean vacation and said they served something like this there. (He also said the bottled stuff didn’t quite live up, but was close.) And man is that stuff good. They used to have one they call “Bajan Style” that’s very similar but not as super spicy as the stuff I linked above, but I haven’t been able to find that on the Baron website. (Maybe it’s discontinued.)
I love an Indian/curried flavored hot sauce. Have you had https://hdsauceco.com/products/tikk-hot-masala
It’s my favorite. Absolutely delicious
what’s your opinion on buldak ramyeon?
how’s your experience in the bathroom? doesn’t it hurt?
I’ve never tried it. I don’t eat grains (ok, except for white rice), so it generally wouldn’t be on my diet.
No issues in the bathroom at all. I honestly notice no difference between post-spicy-food-binge and post-super-mild-diet in that regard.
