These are the hottest things I’ve ever tasted, and here’s my journey to spicy chips.
A few months ago, I decided to try some spicy potato chips. They were interesting, and next weekend I tried something hotter. They were actually really good, so I kept on trying hotter and hotter things every week, until I ran out of options at the local supermarket.
Yesterday, I visited my local Turkish supermarket, which sells all sorts of weird things I’ve never seen before. They even had a bunch of potato chips from obscure brands that are probably normal in Turkey and Middle-East.
Among those, I found these… non-potato chip thingies. Nevertheless, they’re, by far, the hottest thing I’ve ever tried. At first, I just took a tiny little crumb. It burned so hard, but after a while I was ok. Then I took another crumb, it was really hot etc. After about an hour, my mouth was strangely getting adapted to chili, so I could take small bites too. It just escalated from there, and less than 24 hours later the bag was empty.
What a weird experience! I never thought you could get adapted to chili. I thought it would be equally hot all the time, but that’s not at all how it works.
It’s really weird. Now I’m beginning to understand those chili eating competitions, habanero challenges and all that. If you’ve been doing this for years, you can probably eat just about anything. I built a surprising amount of tolerance in a day, but then again, I did start from zero.
I don’t know what those Turkish things are, but perhaps Chinese 辣条 (lit. “spicy strip”) could take their place if you’d prefer something more chewy in texture. They come in a bewildering variety of flavours, textures, and spice levels that range from “huh, that’s got a bit of a bite” to “OMFGICAN’TFEELMYMOUTHTHROUGHTHEFLAMES!”.
This one is on the lower end of medium spice and is intended to be “beef” flavoured. It’s OK. Not spicy enough for my needs, though.
Coincidentally, there’s a Chinese store nearby. I think I need to check if they have something like that available.
The way to ask for them is to either show that picture (they’ll know what it is instantly from that) or “LAH TEE-OW” with the latter pronounced as a single syllable.
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