Slow burn, moderate spice is the best. If I get something spicy, I prefer it in the serrano range of heat. I wish more recipes would use dried chilies, the masters of slow burn. Buy yourself some dried Guajillos, Pasilas, Ancho or Morita and put them in your next meat stew. They are the best.
Also, there’s no reason why you can’t combine spice with mayo. It’s a great combination. Creamy and spicy are not mutually exclusive. (Although I despise any variation of “Buffalo Sauce” which is just hot sauce + butter. There’s no reason for the butter in the first place!)
Spicy food is in my blood. Don’t ask me how though.
My tolerance is pretty high thanks to an early love for heat and a cajun wife who helped push my limits with her cooking. Heat on Thai and Indian dishes are probably my favorites, but Korean is up there. My favorite heat is the slow build, though I also have a love for the pepper-bomb effect. It’s probably a light masochism at this point.
I’ll have to get back to you on recipes though, since right now chopping up some Thai chills and tossing them into whatever I’m making is my usual style, and the heat I can tolerate is much higher than most people I know. I have a few Serranos I’m about to use for a taco filling recipe, we’ll see how that goes.
…and yeah, the after effects are way worse than the instant.
This is the thing that keeps me from eating a lot of spicy food. Particularly as I get older, the digestive system just can’t handle it like when I was younger.
I like a good amount of spice but don’t usually go crazy with hot sauces and stuff. Things that are spicy just to be spicy aren’t that appealing to me.
I recently added harissa to my condiments options at home. It adds a lot of flavor and a good amount of heat to things.
I dislike when spice is paired with acid, generally, which I find most hot sauces to be. But I definitely am a sucker for smoked chilis, with sweet or creamy.
Dark secret - I’m really bad with…well, not necessarily spicy food, but mostly just chilli-hot or similar food, but same-same to everyone but serious pedants, present company presumably excluded. I’m trying to get better with it, but it’s slow going. I’ve gone from barely being able to stand pretty mild stuff, to being able to somewhat eat food with a middling amount of sriracha. Getting there slowly!
I tend to treat spicy food the same way as I do all food. Like a child.
I have this weird thing where I evaluate food as though I’m still 7, despite being 27.
So I look at cake and am like, ooh that seems amazing, one bite and I’m like, oh yeah that’s gross, because sugar is gross.
Same is true of spicy food, I look at it and go, that’s probably awful and spicy, but try some and I’m like, wow why is this so delicious? In my older than 7 age, spicy food is just delicious flavor most of the time. Some things that other call very spicy, like the hottest sauce from BWW I don’t find very spicy. So maybe my tolerance is very high, however my initial reaction always being that of a 7 year old lead to me not trying new spicy things often. It’s a whole world I really need to explore.
I almost always have some kind of salsa in my house. I like having a red and green salsa handy at all times. Chips and salsa is a great snack. For brands I stick with regional brands here in Texas or Mexico.
For hot sauce siracha and franks are good. I never gotten into trying out the killer death hot sauces. I do like watching hot food eating challenges. One in particular is Hot Ones on YouTube. It’s part interview and part hot wings challenge. Entertaining and hilarious.
Most of my dad’s current hot sauce collection with the one in the middle(Mad Dog 357) being the hottest. I had some of the Mad Dog while I was there over the weekend, without knowing that it was his hottest, and I can confirm that it is very very goddamn hot.
I always find it amusing to see the different level of spice tolerance amongst people.
I do like many things spicy but it can be overboard if it masks the flavour of the food or the cook’s inability to create a standout flavour.
Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s in suburban Australia they didn’t really even sell good chillis in the shops so we had like 6 plants in the backyard which we would eat raw with meals or dried and fried.
Also English mustard for any ham sandwich or even just with roast pork is pretty great along with a roast apple.
The irony in that is that baby boomers are supposedly the reason for the recent increase of popularity of spicy food. The theory is that as you age, your taste buds become less sensitive, so the boomers appreciate spicy food more because it gets harder for them to taste anything else.
Additionally, the reception of spice relies on a finite neurotransmitter that regenerates slowly. So spicy foods eaten regularly will have diminishing returns.