These are the hottest things I’ve ever tasted, and here’s my journey to spicy chips.
A few months ago, I decided to try some spicy potato chips. They were interesting, and next weekend I tried something hotter. They were actually really good, so I kept on trying hotter and hotter things every week, until I ran out of options at the local supermarket.
Yesterday, I visited my local Turkish supermarket, which sells all sorts of weird things I’ve never seen before. They even had a bunch of potato chips from obscure brands that are probably normal in Turkey and Middle-East.
Among those, I found these… non-potato chip thingies. Nevertheless, they’re, by far, the hottest thing I’ve ever tried. At first, I just took a tiny little crumb. It burned so hard, but after a while I was ok. Then I took another crumb, it was really hot etc. After about an hour, my mouth was strangely getting adapted to chili, so I could take small bites too. It just escalated from there, and less than 24 hours later the bag was empty.
What a weird experience! I never thought you could get adapted to chili. I thought it would be equally hot all the time, but that’s not at all how it works.
Be advised that different cuisines use different chillies which hit differently.
I lived in the US for a few years and when I went out for curry, the staff would warn me that some of their curries were hot... until they realised I was a Brit at which point they were like 'ok, enjoy'. I could out-spice all of my American spicehead friends with curries. But some of the Mexican food I tried blew my head off completely while not especially bothering my American friends. I got used to that too but it took some acclimatisation.
Oh, that’s weird. It thought it was all about capsaicin. Then again, food chemistry is incredibly complex, so unexpected interactions with other compounds is the norm.