I first discovered Huy Fong Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce when I saw it sitting on the table of a cheap  Chinese restaurant in Carson City, NV, of all places. This is especially surprising when you consider that I spent the first 23 years of my life living right on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco.  Yes, yes, I know that Huy Fong's Sriracha is a Vietnamese variation of a Thai sauce, but I'm saying it's funny that I grew up in a major city, surrounded by several cultures and cuisines, and it took me moving to a much smaller, much less ethnically diverse city to discover Sriracha.

Ubiquity!

Sriracha is the sauce that made me realize I probably did like hot sauce after all.  After Tabasco scared me off of hot sauces, I spent several years in my young adulthood simply sprinkling cayenne pepper on food in order to make it spicier.  This was mostly effective, but not the most flavorful or pleasant way to add heat to things.

But then I sat there in that restaurant in northern Nevada with a bowl of won ton soup in front of me and this big bottle on the table caught my eye.  It was a red-orange sauce with a bright green cap and a little rooster on it.  I mused aloud about it and the friend who was with me said, "Oh, yeah...that's rooster sauce.  I mean, it has a real name, but all my friends call it rooster sauce.  It's really good!"

I was intrigued, but hesitant.

I have to pause for a confession.  I am actually, by nature, a huge coward about spicy food.  Perhaps it's because I'm from the Land of the Bland.  Perhaps it's because I was always a picky eater growing up.  Or maybe it's just an expression of my general, deep-seated cowardice.  Whatever the source, my traditional first instinct when approaching something spicy has been fearful caution.  It's only been through a series of accidentally eating things that are "too spicy" and then finding I'd enjoyed the experience that I've trained myself to know that I should probably plow ahead when faced with that fear.  But this story takes place very early in my capsicum-laced journey, so the fear was real and very present.

I bravely tasted a tiny little bit.  It was great!  It was spicy, but with a mild sweetness that complemented the savory garlic flavor really well. Emboldened, I gamely went to add a little bit to my soup, but accidentally squirted out way more than I'd meant to.  The broth turned red and cloudy...almost opaque.  What had I done?!?  But I steeled my nerve and tasted the soup, which turned out to be scrumptious and spicy.

And then I immediately swallowed it wrong and choked on my own hot peppered throat for a while.

Undeterred, I dove back in, drinking the searing brothy elixir.  I was hooked.  I bought a bottle of my own at my next opportunity, which was pretty shortly thereafter because there were not one, but two Asian markets in Carson City at the time.

I got so into it that at one point, I mused it might make a pretty good pasta sauce all on its own (which it really actually doesn't).

Okay, maybe not good for EVERYTHING.  But do you think I can pay for Sriracha on my FSA?
To this day, it's still my most common day-to-day hot sauce.  Eggs, pasta, soup, pizza, sandwiches, potatoes, rice, chicken, hamburgers, steak, etc., etc.  It's good on almost everything.  I've seen people put it on Mexican food, and I'm not judging, but I find its sweet garlicky taste is not ideal when combined with such fare.  That's my personal experience, though.

It's just a really excellent sauce and needs to be in your kitchen.

And did you know they've started putting it in little to-go packets like ketchup?  Why didn't this happen sooner?


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Several news outlets are reporting that the world record holder for hottest chili pepper has been defeated by a new contender:  The Dragon's Breath.

Here's the story on The Daily Post.
Little.  Orange.  Deadly.
In case you've been hit by a paralytic poison dart and can't navigate away from this page, the article tells us that a Welsh fellow named Mike Smith has created a chili cultivar that beats out the top pungency numbers for the Carolina Reaper, which has been the world record holder for spicy heat since 2013. 

Note that in the embedded video, the grower mentions that the Carolina Reaper clocks in at 1.4 million Scoville Heat Units.  But a bit of research (Wikipedia) tells me that the official Guinness World Record heat level recorded for the Reaper is actually 1,569,300.  That number's an average of the samples tested, with the top sample topping out at 2.2 million.  I probably shouldn't quibble, since the Dragon's Breath's recorded 2.48 million is actually the average of samples tested, with the top number (displayed in the photo below) being over 2.7 million.  Military grade pepper spray is supposed to be about 2 million SHU.  Ouch!

The new pepper is so pungent, in fact, that Mr. Smith (if that is his real name) provides us with a warning that attempting to pop one in your mouth might actually damage your airways and could lead to death by anaphylactic shock.

This raises some interesting questions for me.

In the world of chiliheads, extreme heat is touted with much reverence and bravado.  The more natural (extract-free) heat you can wrestle from a single cultivar of pepper, the more you can charge for a sauce and the more hits you can get on your website (or blog post...hint hint).  The fervent pursuit of hot, spicy food is not generally characterized by timid restraint.

But as new hybrids and cultivars are developed every few years, each hotter than the last, are we not bound to eventually hit the absolute limit of human tolerance?  If a hot pepper can't be consumed on its own without potentially killing someone, is it still food?  The article linked above mentions that the new pepper may have medicinal applications due to its strong concentration of capsaicin.  And I imagine it could be used very sparingly to heat up hot sauces or chili powders.  But if we already can't pop one of these in our mouth, then what about the next, even hotter pepper?

And at what point do these peppers stop being food altogether?  At what point does the development of new chilies become a sporting competition to make the highest possible numbers spit out of a high performance liquid chromatograph in a hermetically sealed lab somewhere?  Or, even worse, when do they become purely a weaponized fruit, with bushels of them being strewn from the bomb bay doors of half-melted drones?

Or would a mutated strain of human arise, inured to the searing pungency of these new death-peppers, crunching them up happily by the handful and demanding more heat?  Would these Capsicoids rise up to rule over a sea of weeping, sweating, gasping humanity? 

I'm practicing for that day by drinking straight hot sauce and bowing a lot.
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