I generally have to use half a bottle of hot sauce on any food in Monterey, including Mexican food
My whole thing about hot sauce when I got to the U.S. was: ‘you call this hot sauce? It’s mostly just sour sauce’
Most hot sauce (except hot sauce from Mexico) doesn’t really register at all for me on the capsaicin level, but it’s better than no hot sauce
Not interested in the ‘hot sauce to blow your butt and head off’ hot sauces either coz they’re just gimmicks. Also not that hot lol
Pretty sure Salinas will be much better for my taste buds, but I can’t do the 18 mile commute
My standard hot sauce is the El Yucateco XXL hot and I think that’s like a basic level of hot compared to the food I grew up eating.. for breakfast
Kind of feel like there’s a cultural gap between ‘eating really spicy food because it’s tasty’ and ‘eating really spicy food as a gimmick’ coz the latter is so gimmicky and generally not tasty.
You need to infuse the extreme tastiness and spices with the right cooking techniques in specific dishes.
The Thai dish papaya salad with raw crab for example. Done well, the raw crab absorbs ALL the chillies and hits your brain like the opposite of a brain freeze. I love that shit
One time someone I knew who doesn’t really eat that level of spice went with me and tried that dish and it did not go down well after one mouthful of it
I think they sort of went past ‘this is incredibly spicy’ to being sleepy immediately, it was a knock out punch
@skinnylatte Thank you for this belly laugh.
@skinnylatte once a french visitor commented on mexican food: your taste buds are atrophied, proof is the very small amounts of icecream you people eat. To which I replied: your french tastebuds are atrophied, proof of which is the small amounts of chili you guys eat.
Anyways, since I got covid mine did really atrophy. Now I get the hiccups even with very moderate spicyness. Which might be good for my digestive tract on the long run. *sigh*
@rgarcia Eurocentric world view of food and tastes is so weird. All foods come from a completely different base / culture with some overlap from colonialism. Anyone who believes one is objectively better than another is wrong.
I don’t objectively believe spicy food is better but subjectively for me I mostly want spicy food!