Ultra High Scoville Chili by Chris (Burnt Taste Bud) Devaney The weather alert said ‘ice pellets’ tonight and warned of some cold nights ahead, with tomorrow night scheduled to fall to -17F. Not peachy keen in my estimation so I figured it was time to whip up a vat of chili. I have often heard that you can’t make good chili that is too hot. It can’t be done. So, I decided to test that theory. I had some prepared cans of hot Hormel chili, tossed in some cooked boneless chicken pieces, dumped in a wad of hot peppers, jalapenos, sweet peppers, onions, stale beer and I think it was a half cup of wine I found. The stuff was purple and without scum, so, in it went. Then after a severe shaking of a Tabasco container, I found this bottle of hot stuff that has no recognizable logo on it, just some picture of an Indian lady with a pimple on her forehead (please forgive me for my religious ignorance for I am ignorant in many, many things, religion and politics being tops). I had used it before and it proved to be potent even in minute quantities. My friend from NY, Sue, sent it to me and she is still alive so I figured a severe shaking of the bottle over the vat would ratchet up the mix on the Scoville scale. While shaking I hummed out some holy hymns just in case. A Scoville is a unit used to indicate relative heat units of a spicy food. A few hours on the woodstove with no melt down produced an aroma that left a burning desire (literally) for dinner. I would not share it with the dogs for after all, this was a test to see if you could make good chili that actually was too hot. I don’t value the dogs ability to assign a Scoville unit to the foodstuff. Thats MY department. I did ameliorate the edible hell-fire with some cold, ice cold, sour cream and some room temperature cheese that immediately underwent a phase transformation to a yellow, more or less liquid, coating across the surface. I salted the daylights out of it, fed the dogs their dinners while the mix cooled, and then went at it. Oh boy . . . it was reasonable. And reasonable is of high regard for something coming off my woodstove. Yes indeed. It was hot, but not to the point where it would self-combust. The beer, extracted from outside helped to keep an even flow of both solid and liquid cascading through my gullet. The dogs didn’t harass me, nor did the house yak beg for handouts after her first sample. Oh for sure, I knew it was going to be hot even before I started in on it because when I would dip a cracker in it for a taste test while it was till a-cooking on the stove, the cracker never survived. I could never retrieve it back out of the vat. Oh yeah, this would be a chili to remember. I ate a full bowl and there is a ton left to get me through the upcoming cold spell. And I must say that still, I am of the opinion that you can’t make a chili that is TOO hot. Nevertheless, I brought the leftovers to sit outside for the night to get ice pelleted. It’s an environmental thing, you might say. And then I remembered . . . my toilet is frozen. God a’mighty, this will be a night of horror!
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 23:53:37 +0000