Folks, “spicy” is in the taste buds of the diner. No one has said that a single country’s cuisine is ALL or NOTHING.
Take, for instance, Thai food - What @linguafood might get to eat is gonna be WAY different than what I would get. She can do spicy-hot. I can’t. But that doesn’t mean the both of us couldn’t eat at a Thai restaurant - unless, of course, all of the dishes had 3 chili peppers next to every item on the menu!
The original question was general - and people responded based on their personal experiences. Some searched out the spiciness in food; others experienced it accidentally.
I can’t get the links in this article from the Times of India to work, but they posted a list of which 7 countries have the spiciest food in the world:
Thailand
Mexico
Malaysia
Korea
Jamaica
India
China
So there you have it. Question answered. :::dusting off my hands:::
I didn’t say anyone did (did I? I certainly didn’t intend to).
I think it’s the impression some can get when the discussion is around entire cuisines, or the ways restaurants create a particular ranking system that racialises/nationalises heat. It can seem rather limiting, since as you and I both know from friends, this isn’t the case. At least, that is what I was getting from Saregama’s posts, which is why I responded to Saregama-- I’m not trying to start anything or continue anything. Sometimes people like to explore how to articulate something.
THIS! Most of this discussion seems to focus on spicy = hot which is probably how many/most people think of it. But there is a lot of “spice” that isn’t hot at all. Rather, there are complex spice mixtures that have layers of flavor and are not at all “hot”. I’m thinking of things like tagines, spiced ginger bread, Levantine cuisine, etc. I found this article to be a very interesting take on “spicy”.
But the OP specifically asked about “spiciest” in terms of heat level. Not the most gingery, cuminy, or garlicky cuisine, but the hottest.
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
86
Jamaican isnt a cuisine I know well. It’s never taken off in the UK in the way some other immigrant cuisines have. But we had lunch a few weeks back. Curry goat was fine - a heat from chilli but not so hot that the flavour of the other spices was killed off. But the hot sauce that was drizzled over a corn and black bean fritter was a killer.
Yeah, their hot sauces can be incendiary on the tongue, as they often use the scotch bonnet pepper in their sauces. When I visited in 1991 or so, I stayed away from any hot sauce. I’ll gladly admit I’m a hot sauce wimp.
I think the issue here is that the original premise is being interpreted as reductive and monolithic (although I’m pretty sure it’s not…as a fellow traveler who used to frequent Southeast Asia, often times seeking out specific food items, I get their gist). @FindingFoodFluency seems to me to be a well-informed traveler who recognizes regional differences within a country, some of which have spicier food than others. I don’t think they are of the ilk who expects all Korean food to be spicy, which it’s not (disclaimer: I’m Korean, so I’m using that as an example). Spice/heat is so subjective…an example, unlike @Babette, I didn’t experience intolerably spicy food in Bhutan and we ate all the chilies.
Lists of “spicy cuisines” unfortunately can’t capture the nuances, but hell, all lists suffer from that. So those aren’t useful (there is plenty of Korean food that is not spicy but hell yeah, we got some SPICY dishes). The same folks who expect a cuisine to be monolithically spicy might be the same people who are willing to pay out the nose for fancy multi-course Western or Japanese meals but when it comes to other cuisines (eg, Thai, Chinese, Indian, African), expect a cheap meal. So, I think when a whole country’s food gets generalized/becomes reduced to “cheap and spicy,” there may be some justified pushback.
Perhaps we should all respond with the spiciest dish we’ve ever had and enjoyed that required a passport.
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Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
94
Good attempt to get this thread back on track.
I’ll go with the rijstaffel dishes in Amsterdam, that I mentioned right at the beginning of the thread. We were advised to eat the various dishes in the order in which they were laid out on the table. The three very hot ones would be at the end of the meal, so not spoiling our enjoyment of the milder, but wonderfully fragrant, other 15+ dishes.
That was the only time where I’ve specifically flown to another country just to eat. We arrived, checked in to the hotel, went out to eat, slept, had breakfast, flew home.
My dad used to say if you aren’t sweating and blowing your nose by the end of the meal, it wasn’t a good one.
One of B’s spiciest moments was near the Bangkok train station when we were waiting for our overnight to Chiang Mai. He got an innocuous-looking papaya salad at some nearby stall and proceeded to have one of the most painful meals of his life (he’s a white guy from Ohio who developed a taste for spicy food via Texas). I turned down his offer for a taste. Can’t say he enjoyed it per se.
The spiciest two things I ever put in my mouth were an eggplant dish in a tiny village in Northern Thailand, where my ex and I were visiting family. We had to evacuate the house when her aunts started frying up peppers, but somehow it never occurred to me that the smoke and coughing might somehow translate into the heat level of the dish. Not watching the others at the table, I plopped a big ole blob of eggplant on my rice (they used it sparingly, almost like a condiment, and their heat tolerance was obviously much higher than mine). It was inedible to me.
The second time was a ludicrously spicy daal at some Indian place in London. It was a bowl of pain, and ended our evening plans early
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Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
99
Som tam salad can be delicious or ferociously unpleasant. My first experience was at a Thai restaurant in Leeds and it was definitely the latter type. I surprise myself that it didnt put me off forever.
Which, of course, depends on anyone’s personal heat tolerance. Things I’ve found inedible decades ago wouldn’t break a sweat on me nowadays. It’s a process, tho. And sofa king worth it
Many restaurants tone it down for foreigners - I don’t think I had anything insanely spicy in a restaurant. I mostly really enjoyed the cuisine, but there were a few staff meals that pushed the limits of being food. I recall one particular ema datse made with dried red chilies. I tried
Hottest Thai dish was papaya salad in Bangkok. So good but so, so spicy.
Well, everywhere we went they knew I was Korean because they asked me so they knew I could handle the spice. We somehow had the good fortune of meeting and dining with some higher members of their government (probably because they knew that B is a Western doctor). We were asked about our spice tolerance and we told them it was high. They responded in kind…but it was not the intolerable level of spice. We ate so well on that trip (2010…I forgot to grab my CH thread).
I JUST remembered a memory - not of me eating spicy food, but my father back in the mid 1960s (I was probably 8 years old or so).
He had Pakistani friends via his business, and Naseem and Purva came over to our house to cook a Pakistani dinner. Purva told Mom that their food could be very spicy, but she would tone it down for the family. Dad said “no no no! Keep it as you normally cook it!” He had traveled the world for his business, so was very used to trying new foods. He was insisting on it, but Mom put her foot down and said we kids (nor she) were used to spicy food, so she asked for the much lighter spicing, which Purva was willing to do as she had offered. IIRC, it was a bit too spicy for us kids, but we made do.
Well, sure enough, Dad went all in on his plate with the traditionally spicy-hot seasoned foods - and ended up sweating it out. Like - full on bright red, sweat pouring down his face, drinking whatever cooling drink he could. And he finally admitted that it was even too spicy-hot for him. One of Dad’s “I’m a tough guy” moments that didn’t work out for him.
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Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
104
Asian food in the UK started to become popular in the 1970s. At first, it was very much something you did after an evening in the pub. A macho thing - how hot could you stand it. And, of course, many of the restaurants played along introducing hotter and hotter preparations.
A parody of this is the “Going for an English” sketch from Asian comedy show "Goodness Gracious Me)
But, in recent years, a new generation of restaurants have started to open. They tend to be owned by folk of Indian or Pakistani heritage, rather than the Bangladeshi who own most UK "Indian restaurants. And these restaurants are now offering menus that are not the old “any protein with any sauce” curry house type, but are often based on regional cuisine - Kashmiri grills, Mumbai street food, Gujarati vegetarian, etc. And, for diners, it means we’ve a whole new world of food - one that isn’t dependent on the amount of chilli in the dish but, rather, the differences of traditional preparations.
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ChristinaM
(Hungry in Asheville, NC (still plenty to offer tourists post Hurricane))
105
I am very reluctant to wade into this debate, but…I do think @saregama’s point keeps being missed. I think what she was taking issue with is the expectation that certain cuisines, most often Asian, should be customizable to the diner, or to a Eurocentric/American palate. Traditionally, these dishes may require long cooking and spice layering and aren’t easily made mild- this is a concession being made by restaurateurs for customers who aren’t willing or able to challenge themselves to eat a dish as traditionally prepared. If one can’t take the heat from certain traditionally spicy dishes, perhaps it’s better to order an inherently milder dish than to direct the kitchen to make a traditionally spicy dish milder to one’s preference. ETA: this ties in with the generalization of an entire cuisine are “spicy” and therefore needing to be toned down versus recognizing the nuances of different dishes’ preparation.
Her point was that it should be as nonsense to ask an Indian chef to de-spice-ify a masala as it would be to ask a chef in a European restaurant to adjust their traditionally-prepared recipe to suit one’s preference. There’s a discomfort with it being OK (even expected) to require the Other to make their food more palatable for Western tastes. That it’s up to the restaurateur to meet diners where they are rather than diners to stretch themselves beyond their comfort zone. Or to even try to understand the cuisine is varied and learn about traditional dish preparations.
What spicy Korean dishes do you recommend? Especially if they are not also sweet …
I mostly go for kimchi tofu soup and love it. Last summer I had a super disappointing experience where I was psyched to find Korean food in a small mountain town, a few dishes mentioned ‘sweet and spicy’ so I ordered the one not described as sweet and holy crap it was like candied pork. Not sure if it was supposed to be that sweet, if it could have used some char to caramelize the sugar, or if that was adjusted to local tastes. Couldn’t eat it though.
I always forget that Thai food is ‘balanced’ with sugar and even though I love the flavors the overall experience is a sweet dinner. That’s why I’ve been veering towards Szechuan lately - just spicy, not sweet & spicy.
