Week 2, and I’m still alive! Moving into my second week of the experiment, I was nervous. I was just learning to enjoy my first sauce, and then I had to ramp it up to a new level with around ten times as much capsaicin concentration. I’m happy to report that it was mostly not that bad!
The Sauce: Duck Butter Original Pepper Sauce, a cayenne based sauce coming in at 30,000-50,000 SHU.
Why I like it: This sauce still kind of tastes like something. It’s a little thicker than most, and has big, appealing/terrifying chunks of seeds and black pepper and all sorts of other assorted spices. Looking at it right now, it’s really quite pretty – a speckled death sauce, perhaps? In reality though, while it is certainly spicier than I would normally choose, it has a really nice, very vinegary taste.
How I feel: This is the first sauce that is triggering a more physical reaction – most notably, my nose starts to run pretty uncontrollably when I eat more than a little bit of this sauce. No sweating or other noticeably adverse reactions.
Ideal use: if they sounded at all appealing to me, I can imagine a sauce with this much garlic and vinegar could make a delicious Bloody Mary.
Best food I’ve eaten it on: a cuban sandwich the other day – the sauce did a lot to cut down the fat from the cheese and made things real delicious and less one-note.
Least favorite food I’ve eaten it on: just plain sauce, off of a plastic spoon. It wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but it was doing it really just for science rather than the pursuit of delicious.
As I explained a bit in my last post, my goal of the project has experienced a bit of a frameshift. It is less about increasing my tolerance (i.e. things that were once spicy are now not spicy) and more about changing it – learning to sit with and enjoy that discomfort more. I’m still looking forward to my daily dose, and have been enjoying this project far more than I thought I could. I often struggle with feeling fully present in moments, but consuming hot sauce allows me to “tune in” more than most things – because the pain is so concentrated and intense, it feels like I get woken up, and shaken back, and that’s something I’ve really appreciated.
Starting this afternoon I’m on to August in Austin – a red habanero based sauce that is around 350,000 SHU (again, note the ten-fold increase in SHU). Its color is a terrifying, pure red. Looking at the ingredients, there are no fancy spices, tomatoes, etc. – none of that. I’m not sure if I’m particularly ready and/or qualified to move on to the big leagues, but here goes nothing.
Experiencing Spice 