The Spice of Life

Hello again, it’s me. It’s also time for the first proper blog post and the chosen topic is what I did over the weekend. But what did you do over the weekend, Jonathan? You may be asking. What could be so amazing that it required it’s own segment on your website? All very good questions, and ones which will be answered with very good replies. But before I get to that, let me ask YOU a question. What is your favourite taste? Go on, take all the time that you need. Think about what your favourite flavour might be. Is it sweet? Sour? Salt? Or perhaps an odd mixture like beef and Marmite or jelly and cheese? Let me try and guess what you just though of… I know the answer, your favourite taste sensation in the whole world is:

Spice! My favourite taste is spice! How did you know that?

– You

Yes, that’s my favourite taste too, and that is why today’s entry into the blog is about spice and the Chilli Fiesta in Devon.

Last weekend my family took a trip to Rosemoor Garden in Devon to see the Chilli Fiesta, a festival for all things spicy. There were many amazing sights, sounds and tastes to be had including, giant golden chillies, steel drum bands and, of course, much chilli-based produce. The thing that I enjoyed the most though was ‘Chilli Fudge’. It’s a well known fact among my friends (what friends?) that I love fudge. It’s also seen to be knowledgeable if you know that I love chillies, so when I saw chilli fudge, you can expect my reaction. And it was really good. I just finished the last piece now. Highly recommended. But this wouldn’t be interesting if we left it at that; chillies are tasty. So I did some research on the internet to find out some interesting things about them. What I found out is that chilli peppers can get very, very hot.

Have you ever eaten a Jalapeño pepper? If you have, you would know that they’re very spicy. In fact, most measure at about 5,000 on the scoville scale, a scale designed to measure the amount of spice in a pepper. To put that in comparison, your average bell pepper – red, green or bright pink – clocks up at a decent score of 0. Doing the maths shows us that the Jalapeño is an infinite amount more spicy. That isn’t really good once you realise that anything bigger than 0 is an infinite amount bigger. We need to find something more impressive… something like…

The Tabasco Pepper©! So spicy, it can melt right through solid lead!

– www.tabasco.com

Doesn’t that sound impressive? Why, you could break into Fort Knox with that. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells us that the Tabasco Pepper gives us 50,000 on the scale. That’s 10 times hotter than Jalapeño. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Our final pepper can only be found by climbing the Scoville mountain to it’s peak. at the very top of the scale, way above the likes of the Ghost Pepper, Infinity Chilli and Trinidad Scorpion is a doorway to the USA. Walking through this will bring you to a state called South Carolina, home to the Carolina Reaper. People have died trying to eat this one. The heat unit of the certified hottest chilli in the world is 2,200,000. That’s 440 times hotter than the now insignificant looking Jalapeño and most certainly more spicy than the fudge I had at Rosemoor. And so, our chilli journey is at an end.

Thank you very much for reading (and sorry if I scared you off from eating peppers) and enjoy this quote about the Carolina Reaper until the next blog. Good bye!

I have lived… a taste nightmare.

– Charles Lincoln ‘Link’ Neal III