Spicy Food
All about spicy food of all kinds - hot sauces, hot chile peppers, snacks, spicy dishes, hot wings, and more - and even bland food!
New! Spicy Food Reviews - Hot Sauces and Spicy Snacks
10 Common Food Myths Debunked
Digg
ShareI've taken on several kitchen and food-related myths and misconceptions to see if there's any truth to them, including as "Can Hot Sauce Really Clean a Copper Penny?", "Is Margarine is Better for You Than Butter?", "Does Searing Meat Seal in the Juices?", "Does Alcohol Burns Off During Cooking?", "Does Decaffeinated Coffee Actually Contain Caffeine?", "Does Cold Water Boils Faster Than Warm Water?", "Will Pork that is Slightly Pink Will Make You Ill?", "If You Boil Vegetables, Will All the Nutrients Will Be Taken Away?", "Can You Bake a Potato in a Microwave Oven?" and "Does Adding Salt to Water Makes it Boil Faster?" Read on to see if they be busted or proven correct...
Review: Snyder's of Hanover Hot Buffalo Wing Pieces
I'm not a fan of hard pretzels by any stretch of the imagination. Soft ones I can handle, but to me regular hard pretzel twists and sticks are akin to gnawing on salty, overly dry tree branches. The really big hard ones are absolutely horrible - why someone would chew on burnt-bread-flavored rocks that suck all moisture out of your mouth is beyond my comprehension.
Surprisingly, though, Snyder's of Hanover Hot Buffalo Wing Pieces are these such hard pretzel bites and actually appeal to me. Read on to find out why.
WKRP EXTENDED Thanksgiving Turkey Drop Scene from
I want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving! To me, nothing "says" the holiday like the "Four Fs": food, family, football, and...food. Oh yeah; and WKRP in Cincinnati. For those of you who have never seen the this scene (and for those hankerin' to revisit it), here is what I consider to be the best TV clip ever produced about turkey day. Enjoy!
Kitchen Tech - Food Gadgets for Geeks, Part 1
Atomic Food Containers
Scare your co-workers off from stealing your food out of the company fridge with Atomic Food Containers. Three containers of different size feature different warning labels informing everyone of their radioactive or biohazaedous content. Mcrowave and dishwasher safe, the three pack costs $8.99 at http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/9468.
All Edges Brownies Pan
This ingenious cooking pan will permanently do away with undercooked brownie centers while producing the firm, crispy edges everyone loves. Features a premium nonstick coating and round, easy-to-clean corners. Includes a custom spatula. The All Edges Brownies Pan runs for $34.99 at http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/a1aa/?cpg=ab
Star Wars Darth Vader Toaster
Whether or not you like your bread toasted on the "dark side", this Star Wars toaster will create an awesome Darth Vader shape burned in. Coming soon from the Start Wars online shop for $54.99.
Toastabags
Toastabags will allow to create piping hot sandwiches right in your toaster. These non-melting bags are reusable; just wipe them out and they're ready for more cookin'. Comes in a pack for two for $9.87. Link
Onion Goggles
Until tear-free onions hit the market in another 10-15 years, these $24.99 set of glasses might do the trick of preventing crying in the kitchen. Onion Goggles will create a seal around your eye sockets, preventing tear-inducing onion particles from irritating your peepers.
Drive Bay Toaster
Completely bizarre and impractical but cool nonetheless is the PC Drive Bay Toaster. It's a real, working, one-slice toaster that installs inside a 5.25" drive bay on a working computer. It comes a crumb tray, a ventilation exhaust (requires a free PCI slot), and Windows software for adjusting toasting heat and time. Purchase one here for $29.99.
Automatic Stir Mug
Keep your coffee or other drink stirred up at the push of a button. This battery-powered stir mug is stainless steel and has a see-through lid. Get $18.95 for one, $32.95 for two at the Gevalia website.
$18.95 for one, $32.95 for two.
DaysAgo Refrigerator Timer
Don't know how old the items in your refrigerator are? Never guess again with the DaysAgo Refrigerator Timer. Set the number of days or hours and attach it (using a magnetic clasp or suction cup) to your food containers. You can get a two-pack of these timers for $7.99 here.
iPhone Bacon Case
From the "ummm, okay..." department: a real, cloth iPhone case that looks like wrapped-up breakfast bacon. Weird, yes, but they're strangely cool. Get yours here at this German website.
Do-It-Yourself Hot Sauce
By Kerri Conan
If you hurry, you should still find a few bushels of local chiles here and there. Grab what you can — at least a couple quarts — and don’t worry about how glamorous they look; some are bound to be shriveled and beginning to dry. For this sauce recipe (which comes from my husband’s uncle, a painter from New Orleans who has lived in rural Mexico for the better part of 40 years) it doesn’t even matter what kind they are — though obviously the hotter the chiles the hotter the brew.
Once home with your stash, don’t refrigerate them. Green fruit will eventually turn red, orange, or yellow; you can make sauce at any stage, but I don’t like to mix ripe with unripe in the same batch. We grow ring-of-fire cayenne, poblano, and jalapeño, and the bottle you see here includes a mixture of the three, all fully ripened. I also make an all-green jalapeño that’s herbaceous, with slightly bitter notes.
When you’ve got 15 spare minutes and the color is where you want it, put on a pair of rubber gloves and get out the blender. After you rinse the chiles, chop the stem off each (I use scissors), get rid of any bad spots, and drop them into the container of the machine. You can core them and clean out the seeds, but why bother? This stuff is going to be hot no matter what you do.
Pour in enough white vinegar to submerge the chiles, along with a handful of salt. Puree until quite smooth. Transfer the sauce to a pot and bring to a boil, stirring once or twice. Seriously: at no time during either of these steps do you want your nose or eyes anywhere near the fumes that waft from these vessels. Funnel the sauce into a clean jar or bottle and cool. Then cover with a cloth napkin and let the mixture sit at room temperature for three days, undisturbed. Carefully pour off all but a thin layer of the vinegar (which true enthusiasts save for another use) and refrigerate. The sauce keeps for months; you’ll know if it goes off when it starts to ferment and get sort of effervescent. But you’ll use it all before then.
Courtesy of the NY Times Blogs. Link: http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/diy-hot-sauce/
Turbaconducken (Turducken Wrapped in Bacon)
Just when you thought turducken (a turkey wrapped over a duck covering a chicken) was the pinnacle of festive meaty goodness, they add bacon to the mix and invent...Turbaconducken! I can now die a happy man.
Link: http://bacontoday.com/turbaconducken-turducken-wrapped-in-bacon
Review: Devil Dust Crushed Chile Pepper Seasoning
Looking for something that adds a quick kick to just about everything you eat? A little 1.5 oz bottle of Darst Devil Dust, produced by Waddy Spice Traders LLC, may be the answer you've been looking for.
Paolina's Peppers Pack a Punch
Massachusetts Cafe owner Paolina Lapore experiments with growing and cross-pollinating pepper plants:
"SWAMPSCOTT - Paolina Lepore has been conducting an impressive experiment with a pretty prominent pepper plant but now she has a perplexing problem - people are pilfering the produce.
Situated just outside the front door of Humphrey Street's Caffe Paolina is a pepper plant that Lepore, who owns the café with her husband Vincenzo, coaxed into existence from seeds. Tied up with a bright red ribbon, it is unusual in that it stands nearly four feet tall, offers both hot and sweet peppers in very distinctive shapes and is in fact still producing so late in the season.
Perhaps it is the latter that has made it attractive to pepper pickers as well.
Lepore said she has noticed that a number of the peppers have gone missing. She laughed, however, when she said some have been found lying on the sidewalk with a bite taken out of them. While the plant produces both sweet and hot peppers, it's impossible to tell which are which on sight. She believes the withered peppers on the ground were hot and that fact came as a surprise to those who thought to pocket a pepper...
Why Some Baby Boomers Like It Hot, Hot, Hot
Courtesy of Examiner.com:
"As if aging Baby Boomers aren't losing enough, add a loss of taste to the list.
We're losing our hair, we need glasses for reading and distance, our hearing is going, and let's not even get into the 401(k) losses.
Our sense of taste is going too, and as a result, our hankering for hotter and hotter, spicier and spicier foods is growing.
Here's an interesting statistic, gleaned from a recent AARP Magazine article with the headline "Some Like It Hotter": In 1998, each person in the United States consumed 4.7 pounds of chili peppers (that excludes bell peppers, by the way). In 2007, our per person consumption of chili peppers jumped to 6.3 pounds per person.
The AARP article and others say the trend is due to Baby Boomers and the natural aging process that affects both taste and smell.
"As we age, the taste buds begin to disappear from the sides and roof of the mouth, leaving taste buds mostly on our tongue. The remaining taste buds eventually become less sensitive," says Phil Lempert, the Supermarket Guru, who analyzes food shopping and marketing trends.
In addition, with age some scents become more difficult to distinguish and that has an affect on the ability to perceive certain flavors.
The end result of all of this is the need for spicy foods because we perceive that the food we're eating is too bland.
What's interesting, according to Lempert, is that the effect we get from the jalapenos or Wasabi mustard or hot sauce or horseradish isn't taste, it's a nerve stimulus.
When we eat a hot pepper, for instance, it's the active components capsaicin that's kicking in.
"... the 'kick' or sensation is a function of how much pain it inflicts on nerve fibers in your mouth ... these pain fibers are actually wrapped around the taste buds. We consider them 'hot' because they stimulate only a subset of the pain fibers in your mouth, not all of them," he says.
It's said that salsa outsells ketchup, a point to bolster the hotter argument, though one source makes a good case that salsa outsells ketchup and ketchup outsells salsa, depending how you interpret the numbers."
Funny Tobasco hot sauce commercial:
Obama's Red Scare - Hates Beets, Loves Spicy Food
What are Barack Obama's "friends" and "foes" when it comes to food? Here's a New York Times article detailing that question:
"In the coming months, as President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, pack their bags for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and then set up a new household there, we'll be learning more about their style and tastes, and that applies to matters culinary as well as sartorial and decorative.
Already, our education is beginning.
And we now know this: the president-elect would recoil at one of the starters on quite possibly three quarters of the "new American" menus around Manhattan.
Mr. Obama doesn't like beets.
A story that The Associated Press released over the weekend quoted him saying: "I always avoid eating them."
And the story cast beets in the role of broccoli under the first Bush administration: as a perfectly lovely vegetable suddenly demonized at the highest levels of government, the innocent victim of an executive disorder.
What, in contrast, does Mr. Obama relish?...
Review: Savory Collection Diablo Hot Sauce
Here's a brand of generic habanero pepper sauce I stumbled upon at one of my area grocery stores for only one dollar: Savory Collection's Diablo Hot Sauce...
2009 Scovie Awards Winners List
The winners of the 2009 Scovie Awards have been announced. Click here to view the top award getters in 16 separate categories...
Let A Jalapeño Dip Spice Up Your Party
(NAPSI) - Jalapeños, probably the most familiar of hot peppers, not only spice up your party as a delicious dip, they have many other beneficial qualities.
Perhaps the most surprising feature of peppers is their nutritiousness: They are an excellent source of many essential nutrients, especially vitamin C. Hot peppers contain even more vitamin C, 357 % more, than an orange. Moreover, red peppers are quite a good source of beta-carotene.
Peppers have also been known to work as an anti-coagulant, thus possibly helping to prevent heart attacks or strokes caused by a blood clot.
During the winter months, hot peppers are available from Mexico (and sometimes the produce section of your local supermarket).
Here's a recipe you may want to try:
Jalapeño and Mint Dip
Ingredients:
* 2 jalapeños
* 1 cup fresh mint
* 1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
* 1/4 cup olive oil
* 1/4 cup plain yogurt
* Salt
* 4 pita pockets, cut in fours and toasted
Place the jalapeños, mint, vinegar and olive oil in a home blender and puree until smooth; add the mix to the yogurt and stir until blended. Add light salt to taste. Serve with the pita chips.
Serves four.
This delicious recipe was developed by the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas.
For more information, please visit www.freshfrommexico.com.
When your guests dip into this jalapeño and mint dip, they'll not only be getting great taste, but lots of nutritional benefits.
World Record Setting Pepper Comes to Mad Dog World of Hot Sauces
Sudbury, Massachusetts (PRWEB) November 10, 2008 - Ashley Food Co., creator of the world's hottest Mad Dog 357 Hot Sauce, has introduced a hot new edition: Mad Dog 357 Ghost Pepper Hot Sauce - a blend that's bound to warm the hearts and obliterate the tongues of hot sauce collectors everywhere.
Master Sauce Crafter and Creator, David Ashley, whose sauces and extracts have won the accolades of heat seekers around the world, says, "In the world of hot peppers, the Ghost Pepper is the king the of hill. It was only natural to bring it to this super hot line of all natural Mad Dog 357 Hot Sauces."
Called the Bhut Jolokia in its homeland of the Assam Region of Northeastern India, this pepper was first discovered by Paul Bosland, Professor at New Mexico State University, Regent. Guinness Book of World Records confirmed the finding that the "Ghost Pepper", as it is translated, delivers 1,001,304 Scoville Heat Units (SHU) making it nearly two times hotter than the Red Savina, the prior champion pepper of heat.
Of course the Ghost Pepper isn't the only ingredient that makes the new Mad Dog 357 Ghost Pepper a hot new contender for heat lovers. The bottle, that can be seen and purchased at ashleyfood.com, also boasts a unique holographic label with ghosts that appear to jump off the bottle. Combined with the fact that the warning label reads loud and clear about the extreme caution, it's easy to see why this sauce will have people seeing their own ghost.
As David Ashley puts it, "The goal has always been to make hot sauces that are not just hot for hot sake, but instead, give heat lovers and sauce collectors sauces with complex flavor combined with true heat." It's one of the reasons why David Ashley says he also has his sauces measured using high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC); to not just state the heat, but to prove it as well.
For more information about Mad Dog 357 Ghost Pepper Hot Sauce and the complete line of hot sauces and barbeque sauces crafted by Ashley Food Company, visit www.ashleyfood.com.
A Whole Bunch of Hot Heads - The Pepper Lovers Club
Lorraine Eaton of The Virginian-Pilot writes about a local Chile Pepper Club and their annual chili cook-off:
"On Veteran's Day, I ate at the VFW hall in Norfolk with a happy crowd that ladles their dinner into cupcake tins and spends a whole lot of time jacked up on capsaicin, the stuff that makes hot peppers hot.
"The occasion: the local Pepper Lovers Club's annual chili cook-off...
How to Bake a Cake in a Mug Using A Microwave
Here's a guide showing you how to microwave a cake in a coffee mug. The overall prep and cooking process takes less than ten minutes and is perfect for kids.
Link: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Make_Cake_in_a_Mug
Review: Trader Joe's Chile Spiced Mango
While perusing the dried snack/nuts aisle at one of my local Trader Joe's, I noticed bags of Chile Spiced Mango slices on the shelf and thought I'd give them a whirl. Hey, I'm all for combining spice and heat with just about food item, including ones that are predominantly sweet. Some of these types of culinary partnerings are successful, while others are a complete flop. Trader Joe's Chile Spiced Mango slices fall somewhere in the middle.
What is The Scoville Scale?
The Scoville Scale is used to measure the pungency or hotness of a chile pepper. The chemical compound found in chile peppers (from the genus capsicum) that gives this piquant heat is called capsaicin (the molecular formula is (CH3)2CHCH=CH(CH2)4
CONHCH2C6H3-4-(OH)-3-(OCH3) or simply C18H27NO3), and stimulates chemoreceptor nerve endings, especially in the mucous membranes. The number of Scoville Heat Units (SHU) in a pepper or hot sauce indicates the amount of capsaicin present.
Wilbur Scoville and the Scoville Organoleptic Test
While working for the Parke Davis Pharmaceutical Company in 1912, American chemist Wilbur Scoville devised a test for rating the pungency of chile peppers. His method is known as the Scoville Organoleptic Test.
In the Scoville Organoleptic Test...
Blair Happenings: New Site Design, New 2008 Halloween Reserve, and More
From Blair Lazar:
Dear Chilipal,
With Halloween just days away, it also marks the opening of the all new extremefood.com. Here is a chance for you to have some fun and best of all its free. Here's How: Send us you and your ride. Or if you're the shy type, just send you. This is one of the many New Fun sections on the All new from the ground up Extremefood.com. Over the last 20 years, I have learned that I share much more in common with my Chilipals than Hot Sauce. Just to name a few, Great Food, Micro Beers, and Cars. And while we're on the topic of cars, I love um, All of um, and whatever your ride is, I would be honored to have you share it, Even if you walk to work you can just show us your sneakers. I don't care if it's your skateboard, tricycle, Chevy, maybe the highline collector hotrod you just bought at Barret-Jackson, or your rusty hunker. Share, See it, and send it quick, I will guarantee all "legal" lol pictures will be posted on the New extremefood.com and shared around the world to my Awesome Chilipals. Thank you for sharing in my passion for the World of Spice. My Best to you. Feel Alive!
Your Chilipal,
Blair
blair@extremefood.com
P.S. Tomorrow Night I will put my limited 89 Bottle production of 2008 Halloween available for Pre-Order. They are Special and the #89 represents my 20 years of having the pleasure of getting to know the most amazing group of people I could ever hoped to have met in the Chilihead Community that have become such a part of my life. Thank you.
Spicy Food Reviews - Hot Sauces, Spicy Snacks, and more.
