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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/HotSauceGasser on 2026-01-12 04:26:25+00:00.
In hindsight, this was a terrible idea. I’m still coughing and tearing up as I type this.
I’m generally a night owl, so as usual I’m up at 3am cooking up some lunch. Roast potatoes with a side of pickled vegetables, and the culprit of my fuck-up: fried courgette (zucchini for you Americans).
It’s nothing I haven’t made before, just a dash of hot oil in a pan and some courgette slices cooked until brown. Light, tasty, but not quite the kick I was looking for tonight. No, I needed something extra. Something spicy.
Luckily, my sister got me a fancy hot sauce set for Christmas. These weren’t your average “tastes like fire and regret” sauces. They were made from extravagant chilies mixed with mango and other ingredients. I’d tried them before and they were genuinely delicious.
I could’ve just added the sauce to the vegetables after taking them off the heat. But no. I figured it would taste better if I cooked the sauce into the courgette a bit first.
So I excitedly grabbed the bottle labeled “STINGIN’ SCORPION CHILLI SAUCE” and added a generous dash straight into the hot, oily pan.
And that, ladies, gentlemen, and all in between, is where I fucked up.
It’s worth mentioning that the Scorpion chili is among the hottest in the world, a hybrid bred specifically to cause suffering. It can reach up to 1,460,000 Scoville units.
Instantly, a plume of smoke and steam erupted from the pan, infused with capsaicin. It hit my face just as I inhaled. My eyes, nose, throat, and chest all started burning at once. It felt like I’d tried to breathe in boiling lava.
I was coughing and spluttering, but I couldn't stop. I needed to get it off the heat. I yanked the pan away and quickly plated the food. I figured rinsing the pan would get rid of the problem.
I was dead, dead wrong.
I had effectively deployed homemade tear gas into my kitchen, and it was not leaving.
I turned the extractor fan to full blast and opened the windows before fleeing with my plate of food into my bedroom, which was thankfully uncontaminated, for about five minutes. Then the coughing started again. My eyes began watering. The burn in my sinuses intensified as I realized the gas was seeping into my room through my closed door.
When I opened it, I finally saw how bad it was. The kitchen was hazy, filled with a lingering cloud of pain that was slowly spreading through the entire apartment. There was nowhere to escape to.
The tear gas is finally clearing out, but for the next few hours I’ll be breathing through a cloth like I’m in a low-budget apocalypse movie.
Learn from my mistakes. If you’re going to cook with hot sauce, don’t throw it into hot oil unless you want to gas your kitchen and every room connected to it.
TL;DR: I added extra-spicy hot sauce to a pan with hot oil and accidentally filled my apartment with tear gas.