I don’t know how it happened. Somewhere, somehow along the way, Tuffy P and I developed a love and high tolerance for very hot chiles. I realized it one day when Tuffy was shoveling insane amounts of crushed red chiles on her dinner and commenting that they weren’t even hot. True, they may have been old and not super hot, but hot still.
I had an idea. We own a dehydrator we bought for drying wild mushrooms. Mushroom foraging can be a feast or famine business and when you get a good haul, it’s nice to be able to dry up a batch for use later. Off I went to the grocery store to buy a huge bag of scotch bonnets. I sliced them up, dried them and ground them in a food processor. They were hot enough that during the grinding process I was driven from the room, coughing. They were good though.
The Scoville Scale of chile hotness.
We ran out the other day. I decided this time to try drying a variety of chiles. It isn’t a huge variety because this is after all, Toronto, and there just aren’t that many different chiles available. I got scotch bonnets again and also some long dark green chiles and some jalapenos. I put them in the drier last night. This morning we awoke to the beautiful smell of drying chiles pervading the house. The smell has a sweetness about it that is almost intoxicating. Some of them are dry already. Others need a few more hours.
Do you like hot food? I’d love it if you shared some hot food recipes. I’ll post some here too over the coming days.
27th Street 
Try out some jolokia! … I’ve built up a somewhat unfortunate tolerance for habaneros. The Jolokias are a whole new level…. firehousepantrystore.com sells some smoked jolokias that are wonderful.
Stagg here-I’ve never really gotten into HOT FOODS…I do understand that real Texas chili if served out the freezer will be hotter than hot-EX Dolt .45 now stick fight Dave loves hot sauces & once challenged friends at a party to try this one bottle-I knew it was serious bid’ness when NO-ONE took him up on it-Ex Dolt .45 Big D now Demerit Derek E. use to eat so much hot stuff I think his tollerance level was off tha’ chartz!!! Marty”El Presidente'” aka Martin Jon Garcia & Lil’ Guido use to have a hot sauce collection-…My Dad use to eat hot foods but no longer can..every now n’ again he pushes his limits…gotta hand it to ’em!!
STAGG
I love peppers of all kind too – luckily live in an area where we can get a large variety and grow a large variety. I put them in everything. My step father used to say, he could tell he was coming to my house because sweat would bead up on his forehead as he came up my walk and smelled my cooking. All my hot recipes are the kind you throw a bit of this and bit of that in…..I have one for green chili – but think I gave it to you. If not, let me know, I’ll send it.
I haven’t been eating a lot of hot stuff these days, except what I put in curries. Tried a really lovely hot chili from one of the Indian stores off of Main Street and 49th. It was labelled “chili”.
It was hot. It was good, and made the coconut lamb meatballs in tamarind tomato curry very tasty indeed. Watch for the recipe to be posted soon. (I’m back on the blog again, sporatically till I get my groove back)
Sometimes when we have company I have to remember that lots of people don’t have the same taste for hot stuff that we have.
Hot peppers are great and for sure having a lot of dried product around is a good thing. We grow our own hots and make sure that we go into winter with 3 full quarts of dried product. The scotch bonnets are a bit over the top for us and I rank them as downright dangerous. The stuff we grow generally has a rating of 6k-7k. I would love to grow some that were rated up around 10k if I could find seed but I think that would be about my limit. The biggest issue with growing them is trying to get them to be actually hot. The hot pepper plants in general will provide big yields but the fruit doesnt start to accumulate heat until the pepper becomes quite ripe, In short season areas north of Toronto this can be a problem. Here are a couple of tips that might prove useful:
-if you are going to dehydrate something less potent than the scotch bonnets, don’t throw out the seeds. They have good heat in them and can be sprinkled on pasta, pizza and other things where you want a quick shot of heat. They dry very quickly if you spread out a 6 inch square layer of cheesecloth on one of the drier racks and spread out the seeds on the cheesecloth. I dont think I would eat the seeds of a scotch bonnet.
-If you get serious about buying and dehydrating hot peppers get them at a place like Dr. Flea’s market or some big farmer’s market in September and you can save some cash buying them by the half bushel.
-For grinding really hot peppers take the whole operation outside. We learned that the hard way one year when we jarred up some potent horseradish. The stuff had to be minced in a food processor and after an hour of mincing (we were working on a full bushel basket) we had to leave the house. Even with all the windows open and fans on it was about 5 hours before it was comfortable enough to re-enter the house. Man that stuff is wicked, but the processor works quite nicely from an extension cord on the porch.
We seem to have built up a tolerance for the scotch bonnets, in small doses of course.
An easy one:
TINGA
One small can of chipotle chiles;
Two white onions, the more sugary, the better;
Two chicken breasts;
Celery leaves;
Salt and Pepper;
Maybe brown sugar;
Maybe tortillas.
Boil the chicken breasts in water with some salt and pepper and celery leaves until they are about three quarters done. Then de-bone the chicken (chicken breasts have bones in them here) and tear it into strips, not too big and not too small. Put the chicken aside.
Cut the onion into thin slices and then cut each slice in half. Fry the onions until they are sort of yellowish, almost caramelized. Open and empty the can of chipotle chiles onto a board and chop them up. Put these in the pan with the onions. Taste it. If it is too picante, add a tablespoon of brown sugar. Then add the chicken. Add a little bit of the water in which you cooked the chicken. Cook this mixture until the chicken is completely done.
As an option, you can fork this into tortillas and eat it that way.
Steve, I’m going to try this one, maybe this week. It sounds excellent. Tuffy just bought a can of chipotles as it turns out.
Mr. Anchovy, you are on the right track here.
I will see if I can transcribe one of La Mexicana’s recipes and pass it along. This will take some work because she never measures anything. I will try to figure out for myself how much of what she is throwing in the pot.
I LOVE hot food, but ever since I became a “semi-colon” I’ve found that my system has a lot less tolerance for anything too fiery. But sometimes I still have to go for it …
The only time I’ve ever eaten anything too hot was at Young Lok (sp?) in Toronto (is it still there?) and I ordered the double fried szechuan pork … I swear, my mouth was on fire, tears were streaming down my face, and I was sweating buckets. Couldn’t finish it. Damn.
I’m not sure, Az…was that one of those places on Spadina near college? I can handle a lot of hot, but these days Tuffy P can handle insane amounts of chiles. The ones I dried today have quite a kick and a nice flavour too. In the summer, I’m going to try making my own chipotles out on the bbq.
I’ve never understood the point of eating a chilli if it ain’t hot!!