Now that I spend most of my work days in Monterey, where the food is good, but shall we say mild, I find myself making up for lost time on the weekends.
El Yucateco XXXL hot sauce in.. POTATO SALAD! Everything! When I get home :)
Not quite at the hot sauce in my pocket stage, but soon
Eating here feels like the inversion of how I’ve eaten most of my life.
Back in Singapore / Malaysia / Thailand, everything was spicy by default and you had to go out of your way to eat un-spicy foods and cuisines
Here, I have to add spicy to almost everything
Still haven’t adjusted. Some days if I go for more than 3 days without a capsaicin hit to my brain that is strong enough to notice, I get very very sad
Possibly also why I default to eating Mexican food when I eat out here. Most Mexican cuisines taste close to what I like to eat. I still have to add a ton of hot sauce. Thankfully I live very close to the two Thai places in SF that do ‘thai spicy’ by default (unlike everywhere else) so I don’t even have to ask. Or I order in Thai to really bump it up.
Hot take: Eating not spicy food as a person who prefers spicy food is just as painful as eating spicy food for someone who doesn’t like it
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io BEST AND CORRECT TAKE
@skinnylatte no i seriously feel that
@skinnylatte Hot and spicy take!!!
@skinnylatte please reveal sf ‘thai spicy’ places!
@mikemccabe Zen Yai and Sai Jai Thai
I absolutely dislike Ler Ros coz I find the food super toned down and it makes me extra mad coz I know they can make proper food (they used to own another spot that was great..)
@pagrus I’d qualify it by saying that’s for cuisines that are supposed to be spicy. dishes that are toned down are just very annoying and I’d rather not eat them
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io I get it, spicy by default is normal here too, even if it's just throwing crushed red pepper in to things. the one exception might be the flamin hot mountain dew I tried, I don't think the world is ready
@pagrus supper and breakfast and 3am food (too late for supper? But still a meal) in Malaysia is spicy by default
I need that
Not just one thing but like everything
I’m glad I can get spicy stuff here but not the same
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io oh hell yeah, I made a passable salsa ranchera, it's not even all that spicy but I am pretty excited for tofu ranchero this week
@skinnylatte I like my food to be fairly spicy and for awhile I was working to up my spice tolerance but I've never been able to get even close to tolerating Thai spicy
how cultures that like spice manage to reach the point where that is just average food that average people eat is extremely impressive to me
@waitworry easy, we eat chillies for fun
I’ve been doing that since I was 3 or 4
Food was just food, not ‘spicy food’ and there was not toned down version for kids or ‘introducing kids to spicy food’
Literally just ‘open your mouth and eat a Birds Eye chilli for fun and games’
@waitworry of course there are people with no spice tolerance too but those people are regarded with some curiosity
@skinnylatte that's what I've always particularly wondered about is the children
@waitworry might have changed now but that’s how my wife and I grew up
Might also depend on one’s cultural background. Many Chinese families may not really eat super spicy but mine did. I was surprised to meet Cantonese people who lived their entire lives in Malaysia but never ate anything slightly spicy. It was totally different to my food upbringing where everyone loved chilli and we made our own special chilli sauces
@skinnylatte Oh wow. When I visited Korea I saw people there would sometimes rinse off a piece of kimchi in water for very young kids. Once they were school age though they were definitely eating regular levels of Korean-spicy.
@skinnylatte the default of Mexican cuisine is to add a tone of hot sauce.
@skinnylatte I had learned since childhood that learning to eat spicy food is a borderline essential skill to live in Malaysia, or else your food options will be limited. Thankfully I've been trained to have a decently high tolerance for spicy food, but still.
@skinnylatte Once upon a time, I used to travel with a film container of dried chiltepins.
@phil_stevens great idea
@skinnylatte
for many years,when I carried a backpack laptop bag, I kept one of those small plastic jars of huy fong's tuong ot toi in a side pocket
also a small plastic jar of matouk's calypso sauce
but it's awkward and somewhat shameful to bring your own condiments, if not outright wrong.
so i quit doing it
@cpm I’m not ashamed! My dad rocks a bottle of fish sauce and extra chilies. And when he goes for seafood he also brings his own tongs and crackers.
@cpm @skinnylatte also for the avoidance of confusion the sign on the wall says "No LGB without the T", but just being able to see the first part gives the wrong impression!
@skinnylatte
i like their tuong ot toi still
used to like their sriracha, but either it changed, or i did. Seems way milder than it does in my memory, and yes, sour, exactly!
My fav (now closed) asian grocer told me to not buy it any more try this instead and gave me a bottle of thai sauce, (as in *gave*). Was great while it lasted, but she's gone now & I don't remember what it was.
@skinnylatte El Yucateco is good stuff! I think the XXXL might be the tastiest, as well as the hottest.
@josh0 yes, I like it so much better than the vinegary hot sauces. I’ve learned to like some of them for southern foods but still not my preference
@skinnylatte I’m also not a big fan of the vinegar ones, but if you get a chance I recommend Don Fuego. It’s like if Tobasco was actually as good as the fans of Tobasco say it is! https://www.donfuego.com/