You hear of chile peppers, of spicy dishes and foods, and you think of the heat, right? How hot is it going to be? Would I enjoy it or hate it?
The way things went with the rise of social media, this aspect of the chile peppers, their pungency, was often the only consideration.
Hot sauces, especially, went insane with pungency and funny-horrible naming. Similarly, the only peppers you have heard much about were probably the latest world-record hottest.
What fell by the wayside was all the finesse, all the flavor, all the additional experience to be gained from chile peppers.
Meanwhile, their diversity and their diverse uses in cuisines across the world open a world of flavors, aromas, experiences. This shows how we are really dealing with complex heat, even in the chile peppers and their pungencies as the raw material from which it is all built.
The pungency of peppers alone has more breadth and depth than just “How much can you suffer?”
Some chile pepper’s “burn” starts immediately, some only comes on with a delay.
Some peppers burn on the lips; some in the middle of the mouth; some mainly burn far back in the throat.
Sometimes the burn feels like pinpricks, sometimes it’s the whole mouth that burns.
Descriptors
Ivette Guzmán and Paul W. Bosland published a whole list of descriptors for chile peppers’ pungency in their 2017 paper “Sensory properties of chile pepper heat – and its importance to food quality and cultural preference”:
- Development:
In some chile peppers, the heat can be felt immediately. In others, there is a delay. - Duration:
Some peppers’ heat dissipates quickly; others can linger and burn for a long time. - Location
The heat is felt on the lips or in the front of the mouth or on the tip of the tongue or mid-palate or in the throat. - Feeling
The heat gives a “sharp” feeling “like pins pricking the area” or it is “flat” as if “being smeared or painted on with a brush.” - Intensity
This, finally, is the heat level, the pungency, that everyone usually thinks of when talking about chile peppers, ideally measured analytically and given as Scoville Heat Units (SHU).
Given the range of potential pungencies within chile pepper types, this is also a problematic measure, however.
Guzmán and Bosland themselves both note that labels describing pungency as mild, medium, hot and extra hot are not standardized, but also approximate their descriptions of pungency using the labels mild, medium-mild, medium, hot, very hot, and extremely hot.
Anyways, clearly, heat is much more than mere pungency.
Examples
It makes a difference if one eats / uses a chiltepin or a jalapeno, for example:
Chiltepin is famous for its “arrebatido” heat, i.e. a heat that
- comes on immediately and strongly, that
- is strong, and that
- spreads around the mouth, but also
- dissipates quickly.
Jalapeno has a
- “flat” heat which
- appears rapidly,
- burns on the tongue and in the front of the mouth, and
- dissipates only gradually.
Rocoto, for another great example, gets described as having
- rapid development of
- incredibly sharp heat with a
- “whole mouth effect, lips, mid-palate, throat,
- 4) greatest lingering heat, and
- 5) very hot.“…
This is it is one of the best and most telling descriptions of what it’s like to eat rocoto…
And on…
In addition, chile peppers, especially in their traditional diversity as heirloom ingredients for local dishes, have quite a range of flavors.
Some have a clean pungency, sometimes to the point where they feel clinically pure, with little other aroma. Many, however, have the depth of flavor of a smoky paprika (itself a chile pepper, actually). Some are outright fruity or have aromas of berries.
And then we get to the preparations that chile peppers with all these various characteristics get used in, from simple drying to smoking or fermenting and on to combinations with additional aromatics and spices…
Paper source: Ivette Guzmán and Paul W. Bosland, “Sensory properties of chile pepper heat – and its importance to food quality and cultural preference” Appetite 117 (2017): 186-190
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