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I TiVoed an episode of FoodTV’s Good Eats on the subject of chilies and watched it this evening. One of the interesting claims that Alton Brown made was that capsaicin (the chemical responsible for the “heat” in chilies) is alcohol-soluble. “So should you drink beer to get rid of the fire?” he asked. “No, because beer is mostly water. You would have to swill pure ethyl alcohol.”
But this got me thinking: distilled spirits are only a factor of two away from the proof of laboratory ethanol, and have fully ten times the alcohol content per volume as beer. So it should work, right? I decided to try an experiment. I went to get the big bottle of cheap vodka that I have been storing for a couple of years since I tried making liqueurs, but I realized that I had used it to combat our ant problem this summer (using it was a burst of sudden inspiration: it kills ants on contact and completely obliterates their scent trail, apparently.)
I then remembered that I have a bottle of Absolut in the back of the liquor cabinet that I purchased when I didn’t know any better (they have a damn fine advertising campaign, but the spirit is so feinty that the best tasting notes would be something like “the lining of a rain-proof parka wrapped in a wet tarpaulin covered in vomit.” My guess is that the accountants are making the decision of how much of the distillation run to keep rather than leaving the decision to the distillers.) So I poured vodka for mouth rinsing, a large glass of milk as a fallback, and I clipped a habañero from the garden.
Crunch, chew, contemplate, spit. “This one is not that hot, Jenn,” I say. Crunch, chew, contemplate, swallow. Contemplate. Begin to suffer seriously as the apparent heat rises and rises and rises. “Time to try the vodka,” I think to myself (if I had tried to say it out loud at this point it would have come out “pime poo pie uh ah-kuh”.) Swig, rinse, contemplate.
You curious?
OK: it didn’t work. If anything the burn of the ethanol on the sore taste buds made it worse. I quickly gave up on the vodka and switched to the milk (for the record, that did not help all that much either, but at least it was cold and coating.) I drank more milk (probably three quarters of a liter) than I have likely drunk in the past month total. And now, getting to the end of this post, my lips and tongue are almost back to normal.
So the lessons:
- I grow very hot habañeros.
- Vodka is not a magic cure-all for spice overload.
- Someone with chronic acid reflux disease should not go around taking enormous bites out of the world’s hottest chilies (this last one is just starting to dawn on me.)
You might want to just take my word on these points.
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