Showing posts with label culinary adventures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culinary adventures. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

"Hottest Substance Known to Man"

One of the stores I visited during a weekend stay at Port Jefferson was 'Pepperheads Hot Sauce' -- a mecca of wall-to-wall hot sauces. They even had a table with samples out front for tasting. =)

On the back wall they had the 'Holy Grail' of spiciness - Blair's 16 Million Reserve:

That's it. The race is over. It's chemically impossible to get any hotter ! Not really a sauce, but worthy of inclusion.

What you will find inside the Famous Reserve bottle is amazing, a 1ml pharmaceutical grade vial filled with this Pure Capsaicin Crystal.

Check out The Hot Sauce Blog. The author was brave (crazy? stupid?) enough to add a grain to a bowl of tomato soup, and subsequently made the mistake of giving it to his wife. Read the blog and the comments, and you'll see the testimonies of a few "I can take anything" idiots who've actually tried it straight.

Chile-head that I am, I had my wife take a photo of it, just to say that I saw it. At $275 it was a little over my budget. It's not really something you would use -- more like a collector's item.

I ended up buying another hot sauce -- Blair's MegaDeath -- for my collection -- alleged 550,000 Scoville Units (see link for explanation). They made me sign a disclaimer before purchasing, explaining that after a certain limit they require the disclaimer for legal reasons, citing possible customer misuse of a life-endangering product. (As one commentator noted, after 700,000 SU's you're not really dealing with "sauce" but rather an extract, not intended for direct application).

Here is a list of the hottest sauces known to man.