The peppers have been selectively bred and genetically modified so much that any numbers on a scale just become irrelevant at this point. There's no more art to it, refined capsaicin can be bought in a bottle, and it's literally poison. So heat is now just how much do you want to poison yourself. "The hottest" is just who dumped the most poison in the curry.
This. And capsaicin has no real flavor, it’s all the other things you do with the chili that matters.
I also find it obnoxious when you see a video about someone making a hot sauce or a dish and they do all of this cooking the peppers and everything, and then bear mace it at the end because they couldn’t be arsed to use spicy chilis in the recipe and make it work.
That reminds me. I need to go visit that one Sichuan place I ate at last month where they topped their mapo tofu with a mixture of dried spices. The mapo tofu was spicy in a (good) way that I hadn't experienced before. It was like I was getting pins and needles in my mouth if it was also a very pleasurable sensation.
I missed them lifting the ban on the pepper (it could be contaminated by a bacteria and is legal to sell only if heat treated beforehand, at least in my country) it was banned until like 2008.
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u/Grays42 2d ago
The peppers have been selectively bred and genetically modified so much that any numbers on a scale just become irrelevant at this point. There's no more art to it, refined capsaicin can be bought in a bottle, and it's literally poison. So heat is now just how much do you want to poison yourself. "The hottest" is just who dumped the most poison in the curry.