Thursday, July 10, 2014

If You Can't Stand The Heat...

...stay out of the burger joint. When you have to sign a hold harmless waiver before a restaurant will serve you their super spicy hot burger sauce - that should be warning enough not to take a bite of the burger on which it sits. That is unless you truly have a cast iron stomach that can take truly super high heat. Two reporters over in England recently learned that the hard way and both were hospitalized after only one bite apiece of just such a burger. More on the reporters here. Then again, what do most Brits know about hot food.

I guess at least the guy who owns Burger Off - the Brighton, England, burger joint that makes them - knows something and now so too do those brave but foolish souls who have dared try one. These belly bombing fireballs, called the XXX Hot Chili Burger, have been a boon to his business as people come by to try them, dare others to do so, or watch others as they writhe in pain and just about die trying. As of March 2014, 3,000 people had tried it but only 59 were able to wolf down the whole thing. That is not even 2% who were able to finish it. Several have gone to the hospital and one man, who had an ulcer, may have perforated his bowel because he ate one. Others have gone into anaphylactic shock and a local hospital has reportedly adjusted how they now treat that based on their treatments for ingestion of these burgers; patients are being treated with an adrenalin drip. On one night alone, five ambulances showed up at the eatery. The owner claims that he and his employees never call for an ambulance, they leave that to the customers. (Source and more on the XXX hot Chili Burger here.)

The burger is reportedly made from Piri-Piri peppers (aka: The African Bird's Eye Pepper). I have grown and eaten their close relatives, the Thai Bird's Eye Pepper, before; they are in the same range on the Scoville Scale at about 50K to 100K. They are very hot but not that hot. Habanero peppers, typically between 100K and 300K, have quite the more fiery punch according to the Scoville scale. Somehow though, the chili sauce they use on the XXX Hot Chili Burgers is super insanity hot at 9.2 MILLION Scoville units (source). I would think that heat enough to engulf the diner in flames because that reportedly is about 18,000 times hotter than an average chili which usually comes in at around 500 Scoville units. (I don't know how they call 500 SU the average range for a chili pepper, I would think that nowhere near as hot as average, but 9.2 million SU is still unbelievably hot for a pepper sauce). As to how the owner of the restaurant gets his chili sauce that hot, he says: 'People always ask where I get the sauce from but I always say "If I tell you I will have to kill you." I just got fed up with people saying "well it's not really that hot" (source). I think I'll just stick to fresh peppers like jalapenos, piri-piris or habaneros now and again because there is not enough beer in the galaxy to cool down that kind of heat.

All the best,
Glenn B 

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