"ghost pepper" news and stories

• Your jack-o'-lantern's officially a has-been. Now what will you do with that pumpkin?
• El Dia de los Muertos is underway. One chef honors his late grandmother with this pork in chile-ajo.
• India's ghost pepper may be so named because one bite will haunt you for the rest of the evening.
• Call the kids into the kitchen -- cooking is good for them. Really.

In 2007, the Guinness Book of World Records certified that the Bhut Jolokia pepper (a.k.a. the ghost pepper), which can be found in the Assam region of India and parts of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, is the hottest pepper in the world.

How hot is it? It's so hot that the Indian government announced that they would use the chiles in smoke grenades as a device to force terrorists out of their lairs and to quell rioting mobs. In northeastern India, the peppers are daubed on fences and mixed into smoke bombs to keep wild elephants at bay. That's right: The pepper is so potent it can control feral pachyderms.

It's also irresistible to chile thrill seekers. If you are such a person, then Chunky's Burgers in San Antonio is worth a trip. Joey Prado, owner of Chunky's, is using the Bhut Jolokia in a burger; he was playing around in the kitchen and devised it as a kind of dare.

"I was thinking, 'How hot can I make a burger?' " he told Slashfood. "I get the peppers from an importer in New York. We have one or two people every hour coming in to try it."

Back in February I blogged about Anandita Dutta Tamuly, a 25-year-old Indian woman with an uncanny ability to chow down on massive amounts of the world's hottest pepper. She's been known to gobble 60 bhut Jolokia, or ghost peppers, in two minutes, and even plans a bid to smash the Guinness Record for pepper eating.

But what happens when a mild-mannered journalist goes toe to toe with the spicy behemoth? Not by eating 60, but rather by attempting to consume a single ghost chili in one sitting at the behest of his editor. Said journalist was not me; it was AP writer Tim Sullivan. It all started out innocently enough with a single pepper and the necessary accompaniments of an open beer, a bowl of yogurt and a few slices of bread. For the first few seconds Sullivan felt fine. Sadly his fireproof palate was short-lived.

He describes the "gastronomic mugging" that seared his tongue and sparked a coughing fit. Since Sullivan had to finish the pepper, he soldiered on started chewing quickly and swallowing. As if it needed to pointed out, he notes this is not the way ghost peppers are normally eaten. And with good reason, Sullivan details a sinus clearing, eye-watering, searing heat that none of his coolants seemed to help with except the beer. After 20 minutes he had recovered the ability to speak and lived to tell the tale and called his wife who laughed at him.

What's the hottest thing you've ever eaten? And what are your favorite ways to put out the fire? I'll go first. Once I was in a Peruvian restaurant and ordered my ceviche picante and was not satisfied with the heat level. When I asked for some aji, or hot sauce, and the waiter brought it in the back, I should have known something was wrong.

When he returned the entire plate was covered in little ribbons of hot pepper. In the spirit of he-men, gringos and hot pepper lovers everywhere I knew I had to eat the whole thing. Man was it hot. I felt as if a red-hot poker had been driven into the center of my tongue. My lips burned so much that when I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face and rinse my mouth out they were an angry, inflamed red.

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