"chili peppers" news and stories

London's Thai Cottage put the pow in nam prik pao on Wednesday when fumes from a huge pot of dry cooking bird's eye chilies sparked a terror alert that led police to break down the restaurant's door. Firefighters emerged from the eatery with a pot containing nine pounds of smoking peppers.

Soho residents had complained of a chemical burning their throats and the London Fire Brigade quickly dispatched a chemical response team. When I was a kid my chilihead father had the brilliant idea of making his own hot oil in the house by frying peppers in oil. So I can attest to the fact that vapors from smoking chilies do indeed take one's breath away. Thank god dear old Dad didn't use anywhere near nine pounds.

I will say however that smoking peppers do not smell at all like a chemical. Chef Chalemchai Tangjariyapoon agrees, "I was making a spicy dip with extra-hot chillies that are deliberately burnt. To us, it smells like burnt chili and it is slightly unusual."

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Masochists and chile-heads have a British stockbroker to thank for unleashing Naga Snake Bite Sauce on the world. The fiery brew is made from what some claim is the world's hottest pepper. According to the sauce's creator, Mark McMullan, the naga morich chili clocks in at a breathtaking 1,598,227 Scoville Heat Units, beating out the bhut jolokia chili. In any case the dorset naga hasn't been certified by Guinness, while the bhut jolokia has.

The finer points of world records aside, one thing's for sure McMullan has created one blisteringly hot sauce. To give an idea, the dorset naga is 300 times hotter than a jalapeno. The pepper's name derives from the naga, a snakelike creature from Indian mythology. This may explain why the label claims the sauce is "Like drinking cobra venom." I don't think cobra venom is spicy, but it's certainly deadly.

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An Indian woman has set her sights and taste buds on breaking the Guinness record for eating the most hot peppers. And not just any hot peppers. Anandita Dutta Tamuly plans to eat as many Bhut Jolokia, or ghost chilis, as she can.

Tamuly hails from the state of Assam, where the pepper occurs as a natural hybrid. She seems pretty confident that she can scarf a record-smashing amount of what Guinness recently named the world's hottest chili pepper. On Indian television she recently chowed down on 60 of the fiery peppers in two minutes. Tamuly became a fan of the ghost chili when her mother smeared some chili paste on her tongue to cure a childhood infection.

The current record is held by Anita Crafford who consumed eight peppers in a minute. They weren't ghost peppers though, far from it. They were jalapeños, which are about one one-hundreth as hot as the dreaded Bhut Jolokia. Sheesh, what a wimp!

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A team of archaeologists has recently made a discovery that, while it probably won't make it into may children's picture books - unlike many of the discoveries about past civilizations - could very well make it into a cookbook someday. They discovered the remains of the world's first home-grown chili peppers in what is now western Ecuador. The discovery derailed the long-standing belief that residents of higher and more arid areas, like what are now Peru and Mexico, were the first to grow chilies by more than 1,000 years. There is no question about the time frame for the existence of the chili plants that were identified by "microfossils from grinding stones and charred ceramic cookware" because there has been so much study done of the pottery that "the dates [are] all very tight."

This discovery shows that chili peppers were one of the oldest domesticated foods in the world. More research is planned to try and discover exactly how the people living in villages in Ecuador at that time used the chilies.

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