Adrianna Tan
When I first came to SF 13 years ago I asked for ‘cut chillies’ and ‘chilli sauce’ at a pho place and I didn’t understand when I was given jalapeños and sriracha. None of these met my definition for ‘even remotely spicy’.
13 years later, I’m still annoyed about it but no longer surprised.
(I was expecting sliced birds eye chillies..)
Adrianna Tan
@lipow it barely registers as many thing other than vinegar to me. Which is why I detest it
Ulrike Walter-Lipow
@skinnylatte I can't even imagine not finding sriracha spicy ... it is so amazing how wide the range in humans is, with spice tolerance as everything else :-)
Adrianna Tan
@jeromechoo I do it with fish sauce
Jerome (He/Him)
@skinnylatte my hotpot sauce of choice is cut chilies (I guess they're usually thai chili) in light soy sauce.
None of my friends get it but it's easily S tier chili sauce for me.
Adrianna Tan
@RnDanger yeah that’s how I eat, generally!
2xfo
@skinnylatte
My first time in Thailand i got a dish that came with bird peppers and i thought they would be like jalapenos. People gawked at the amount i piled on. I ate them and i cried and it was great
Adrianna Tan
@lipow recently I went to a Thai place in LA where my Thai friend said in the northeast dialect, make this so spicy that they can’t eat it and my friend will cry
It worked
It was the only thing I’ve had in America that was tasty and as spicy as in a village in Thailand. It was exactly what I needed
I didn’t cry tho, capsaicin is basically a flavor to me. I don’t like spicy for the sake of it but in a dish or cuisine that makes use of it, it’s a different depth of flavor and the lack of it makes it flavorless to me
Ulrike Walter-Lipow
@skinnylatte I totally believe it - it just is so unimaginable to me :-) Like - what it is like when it is hotter than what I can tolerate? Completely beyond me ...
Adrianna Tan
@dan most jalapeños now!
Dan Ports
@skinnylatte Meanwhile, here in Seattle, if I buy jalapeños at the grocery store they are a variety that has been specially bred to remove all the heat, because apparently people here thought they were too spicy
Adrianna Tan
@motoridersd is there a region of Mexico where the food is more spicy than others?
Jorge
@skinnylatte I would liken it to making it palatable to most white people. Laotian or Northern Thai places are the only spots where I know I have to be careful with the spice level. My tolerance has gone down over the years, but I still think jalapeños are not spicy.
Adrianna Tan
@lipow I can’t go too long without eating incredibly spicy food, so I just have that regularly. I’m terrified of losing it, it will mean losing my street cred back home too, so I practice. I have an entire cupboard full of sambal from Indonesia and Malaysia (because sambal sold in the U.S. is also weak)
Ulrike Walter-Lipow
@skinnylatte So amazing. Happy for you that you got your spice fix. How do you maintain that level of tolerance/need? One of our exchanges students, when she just had arrived, needed a heavy dose of sriracha on everything so it wouldn't be too bland, but somehow she adjusted - which she only realized when she visited her aunt in London and could barely tolerate her food that used to be completely normal for her. We apologized for breaking her :-)
Adrianna Tan
@lipow there’s this instant noodle called Buldak 2x, it’s so spicy it makes your lips swell on first contact, but it has no impact on me. It’s very tasty. I think Denmark banned it briefly for being too spicy
Adrianna Tan
Josh Simmons
@steve @dan @skinnylatte next up they going to remove the spice from bell peppers
Steve Canon
@dan @skinnylatte it’s getting worse every year. Basically just green bell peppers now.
Adrianna Tan
@motoridersd nice. I gravitate a lot to Yucatán food. Also love the Mayan influence. The acidity in contrast to the spice is a new thing for me (I’m used to just straight up spice without as much acid) but I’ve grown to appreciate it a lot especially the citrus flavors.
Jorge
@skinnylatte I would venture to guess that the Yucatán peninsula has spicier food because habanero chiles grow easily there and have been part of the local cuisine since they were introduced by the Spanish.
The serrano chile is from the central mountainous areas of Puebla and Hidalgo so central Mexico cuisine and has a decent amount of spice level. The habanero being a lot spicier than the serrano of course.
The northeastern states seem to have more US influence and less spice, while the northwest these days is a melting pot of cultures from different Mexican states so you find a variety of spice levels.
Adrianna Tan
@Holberg i haven't been to sapp, but looks great
Mats Holberg 🇺🇦
@skinnylatte A problem for me—extremely white guy—is that I sometimes can’t even get what a restaurant considers hot. And I totally get that they deal with way too many gringos who go for 10 on the spice scale to look badass, then complain and send it back. But it’s a drag when they override my order and send something with zero heat.
(Question since you later mentioned Thai in LA. Have you been to Sapp Coffee Shop and—if so—what did you think?)
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.