CraigC
Master Chef
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2011
- Messages
- 6,486
When heat leaves no flavor, the food goes to waste.
The other thing is people continue to use spicy as a synonym for hot. Cinnamon breakfast rolls are spicy. Ham with cloves is spicy. Corned beef is, by it's very nature, spicy. So when people ask me if something is spicy, I ask them do they mean burn your mouth hot. Sometimes I really don't know what people mean when they say "spicy".
Other than growing peppers and living in Hawaii, that's exactly me. Using the word "spicy" to mean hot is one of my pet peeves.I have a pretty high tolerance for heat in my food. That said, I do want to taste the rest of my meal. Zhihara, I, too, lived in Hawaii, and that's where I was introduced to Asian kinds of heat, and mixing hot mustard with soy, and started eating (and making) kimchee. But sometimes people use heat just for the heck of it, without using it as a component. Over the years, I've had acquaintances who just like to add heat for it's own sake rather than a part of the dish.
One hard part of peppers-kind-of-heat is that there is no way of predicting how hot a pepper will be. I've eaten jalapenos that might as well be green bell peppers. I've grown several kinds of hot peppers, save the seeds, and they've cross polinated in one generation. I've picked the same peppers from the same bush and had some way hot, and some incredibly mild. And I always beware, when someone asks me at a restaurant (over the years I've introduced a lot of people to, what was to them, unusual cuisines), "will this be hot?" This is so subjective that it is impossible. I'll answer, to me this is just a little hot. THen it burned their mouths.
The other thing is people continue to use spicy as a synonym for hot. Cinnamon breakfast rolls are spicy. Ham with cloves is spicy. Corned beef is, by it's very nature, spicy. So when people ask me if something is spicy, I ask them do they mean burn your mouth hot. Sometimes I really don't know what people mean when they say "spicy".
When heat leaves no flavor, the food goes to waste.
When heat leaves no flavor, the food goes to waste.
I presume you mean heat, as in temperature, rather than spiciness. Temperature wise, I like my hot food to be hot, but not so hot it injures my mouth.
For heat as in spicey, I like just a touch of spicey, so I can still taste the other flavours with it.
I love spicy food, I just wish restaurants served it! I can only VERY rarely find a restaurant that will make food actually spicy. It's frustrating going to a Chinese or Thai place and asking for it to be exceptionally hot, and it isn't at all. At my local favorite Thai place, I usually order a 20 though their scale only goes to 10. That's where it starts to get actually spicy IMO.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the dish is inherently flavorful, but still needs a little zip. For that I'd rather not use a hot sauce or jalapeno pepper which adds flavor which might not be desired as well as adding some heat. Something like the conch salad we have here on the island with good flavors from the veggies and citrus, but gets some kick from whatever pepper is in season at the moment. We are using what we call finger peppers here now, but Scotch bonnets are coming into season - picked up a few at the packing house last week, and hoping to find some more tomorrow.