HOT chili

miketv

Does anybody know/recommend a shop or place in Dublin that sells Hot (I mean the hottest thing available) chili, there are a few indian spice places but it seems to be hit or miss with the heat factor.
Ta
mike

Blub2k4

Ask for their home made chili sauce in madinah on Moore Street, tell him none of the other sauces are hot enough, if you're in need of any more heat after that you're insane.

He gave me some in a takeaway dish before to sample when I complained that he had no scotch bonnet sauce left, try to get the guy with the short hair behind the counter.

The Hill Billy

OP - Are you looking for chili peppers or sauces?
If it is peppers - The last time I was in the Asian Market on Drury Street they had plenty of Scotch Bonnets.

chillywilly

i cant remember the name of the store but its the big asian supermarket on abbey st....they should do the job

Blub2k4

The home made sauce in madinah is just like minced chilis of some sort by the way, very very hot, and you can just splash it into a meal when you're cooking like you'd do with chopped chilis.

NextSteps

Harissa (Middle Eastern chilli paste). You can get one in a blue and red tube (I got in Fox's grocers in Donnybrook). Very very hot.

bonkey

miketv wrote:

Hot (I mean the hottest thing available)

I'm pretty sure you don't mean that at all.

If you have a look around www.chilliworld.com, you'll find sauces which will be hotter than you want.

There's stuff liek Mad Dog 357 (collectors edition) which - at 600,000 SUs is "only" about twice as hot as scotch bonnets and habanero's can get.

If you think you're too hard for that, then you can go all the way up to Blair's 16 Million Reserve, which - as almost-pure-capsaicin - is rated around 16,000,000 Scoville Units.

To put that in context - 1 ml of this stuff would have to be diluted in an estimated 16,000 litres of sugared water before you could no longer taste it

To put it in another context - pepper spray is typically only about 2 million SUs. If you get something like Blair's Reserve on your bare hands, you're in serious trouble.

So ...if you really mean that you want the hottest there is... go and buy online.

Ultimately, the thing to remember is that with chillis themselves, there's no way of guaranteeing whether any given pepper is a hot or mild variety of its family. One scotch bonnet can be 3 times hotter than another which grew on the same plant. If you use pre-made sauces, you can have more consistent results....and you can get the sauce which is too hot for you no matter who you are.

jc

miketv

bonkey wrote:

I'm pretty sure you don't mean that at all.

If you have a look around www.chilliworld.com, you'll find sauces which will be hotter than you want.

There's stuff liek Mad Dog 357 (collectors edition) which - at 600,000 SUs is "only" about twice as hot as scotch bonnets and habanero's can get.

If you think you're too hard for that, then you can go all the way up to Blair's 16 Million Reserve, which - as almost-pure-capsaicin - is rated around 16,000,000 Scoville Units.

To put that in context - 1 ml of this stuff would have to be diluted in an estimated 16,000 litres of sugared water before you could no longer taste it

To put it in another context - pepper spray is typically only about 2 million SUs. If you get something like Blair's Reserve on your bare hands, you're in serious trouble.

So ...if you really mean that you want the hottest there is... go and buy online.

Ultimately, the thing to remember is that with chillis themselves, there's no way of guaranteeing whether any given pepper is a hot or mild variety of its family. One scotch bonnet can be 3 times hotter than another which grew on the same plant. If you use pre-made sauces, you can have more consistent results....and you can get the sauce which is too hot for you no matter who you are.

jc

Cheers JC
but yes I did mean Hot (I mean the hottest thing available).
What I've been using up to now was a limited version type of Dave's Insanity Sauce, I had to show ID and sign a release form to buy it from a chilli shop in New Mexico, was on the 'Warning' top shelf and cost around $35 a bottle, granted its lasted a while. A bit too hot as it sometimes burnt my skin like acid but good heat factor hense i've a extreamly high heat tolorence!
Anyway it was more the chillis themselves on this occasion i'm looking for but interesting about the varing heats from the same plant, i didnt know this,:)

bonkey

miketv wrote:

Anyway it was more the chillis themselves on this occasion i'm looking for
...
but interesting about the varing heats from the same plant, i didnt know this,:)

Well, it may not be "gospel truth", but we've been growing our own chillis for a while and noted that some are hot, some not (but from same plant, picked at same time), and wanted to find out why. Everything we found basically said "It happens...and you can neither predict nor tell."

If you're going for chillis themselves, then Scotch Bonnet and Habanero are about the hottest commonly available (topping out just over 300k SU). Thai Bird's Eye aren't bad (about 100k SU) either.

miketv

bonkey wrote:

Well, it may not be "gospel truth", but we've been growing our own chillis for a while and noted that some are hot, some not (but from same plant, picked at same time), and wanted to find out why. Everything we found basically said "It happens...and you can neither predict nor tell."

If you're going for chillis themselves, then Scotch Bonnet and Habanero are about the hottest commonly available (topping out just over 300k SU). Thai Bird's Eye aren't bad (about 100k SU) either.

where would you recommend getting them from? I checked the website but that seems to be just the sauces

Blub2k4

You can get scotch bonnets in Madinah too.

miketv

Blub2k4 wrote:

You can get scotch bonnets in Madinah too.

Ta
curiously is that place near the parnell side or the abby st side?

Blub2k4

In the middle more or less, it's got a bright orange frontage, ask about their hot chili sauce too, it's got more bite than a lot of chilis I've tried and I like hot food.

I don't do the extract sauces but I've tried a few pretty hot ones on the lower end of the scale, scotch bonnet rates among my favourites and it has an amazing flavour with the heat.

The Sweeper

Something like Nandos extra hot peri peri sauce is quite pleasant if you're looking for a bit of a reliable kick from a supermarket shelf.

I bought a jar of sambal oelek recently, hoping for heat, and it's useless.

On chili plants, I've posted this before, but - distress the plant, and the chilis get hotter. Over water or allow to wilt and then overwater. I find the method I used to call "wet season, dry season" works well. Position the plant in lots of sunshine for most of the day. Let the soil get so dry that the leaves are wilting, but NOT so they're curling up and brittle, or falling off the plant. If they're like stale lettuce, that's perfect. Now water, copiously. Wait a few days, repeat.

Result: extremely hot chilis.

Diogenes

Man both myself and my stomach wall lining are really glad I outgrew that food as a macho experience thing from my early twenties.

Food should be about flavour and not about heat, I'm glad I can cook a curry or some mexican and appreciate different flavours, and not "OMG my scalp is sweating!!"

Blub2k4

Diogenes wrote:

Man both myself and my stomach wall lining are really glad I outgrew that food as a macho experience thing from my early twenties.

Food should be about flavour and not about heat, I'm glad I can cook a curry or some mexican and appreciate different flavours, and not "OMG my scalp is sweating!!"

It's not always about machismo, I used to think it was and with some people it definitely is. Maybe even for the OP it is, in fairness a chili sauce which burns your bare skin is no fun and not a gastronomical experience I would look forward to.
I find really hot spices quite addictive though, at one point I was putting scotch bonnet on sandwiches, anything that I was eating, and scotch bonnet has an amazing flavour, not just heat.

The Hill Billy

I'd agree with Blub2k4. I most definitely like my food highly-spiced. Far more so than most people I know. It is not a macho thing at all. Maybe my tastebuds are phucked because I've smoked for the past 20-odd years. Maybe I just like hot spicey flavours. I even use white pepper on non-spicey food just to give it an extra kick.

The Sweeper

Blub2k4 wrote:

I find really hot spices quite addictive though, at one point I was putting scotch bonnet on sandwiches, anything that I was eating, and scotch bonnet has an amazing flavour, not just heat.

I was going to start a thread on that very thing - do you think hot food is addictive?

I find peri peri sauces or anything with scotch bonnet or habanero in the ingredients is usually FAR nicer than just 'hot chili' - they have that definitive, smoky chili flavour - not just a sort of vinegary kick in the mouth.

One of our local curry houses does a garlic chili chicken masala - a very hot dish, with stewed split green birdseye chilis in it. I love it. I'll usually go for a two-chili dish on the three-chili ratings scale, so a madras normally, but as a condiment I do find I can't keep away from hot sauce...

Diogenes

Blub2k4 wrote:

It's not always about machismo, I used to think it was and with some people it definitely is. Maybe even for the OP it is, in fairness a chili sauce which burns your bare skin is no fun and not a gastronomical experience I would look forward to.
I find really hot spices quite addictive though, at one point I was putting scotch bonnet on sandwiches, anything that I was eating, and scotch bonnet has an amazing flavour, not just heat.

My wife makes fantastic cookies with cayenne pepper you know you like spicy food when you're having it for desert.

But take Dave's insanity sauce, I had a jar of that when I was in college, and if you weren't careful (and I mean eyedrop amounts) careful you'd have a curry or a chili that was just hot and tasted of nothing else, and if you weren't careful you had something that was nigh on inedible.

rubadub

Minesajackdaniels wrote:

I was going to start a thread on that very thing - do you think hot food is addictive?

Yep, it is meant to release endorphins and I think there is a proper medical term for the condition/addiction.

There is a shop in the abbey mall food emporium that has a large selection of hot sauces, probably far cheaper in the asian shops though.

The Hill Billy

Alternatively, you could get a tarantula to bite your tongue.

Red Fan X5

Hill Billy wrote:

OP - Are you looking for chili peppers or sauces?
If it is peppers - The last time I was in the Asian Market on Drury Street they had plenty of Scotch Bonnets.

Scotch Bonnets are now available in Dunne Stores (larger stores).
They're prepacked for € 2.99 grown in Holland as are most chili peppers sold in Dunnes.