If you’re going through hell, keep going. If your own personal hell is a basket of chicken wings that you fear could melt your face upon consumption, I’d add another maxim: Do not touch your eyes.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m in the bowels of Boulder Weekly HQ having just eaten the hottest food I’ve ever had.
I can’t hear very well, and my ears are ringing. I can’t say more than a few words without having to pause to inhale fire; my throat is scorched earth. I’m crying involuntarily and sweating profusely. My right arm is tingling and, for some reason, my middle finger hurts. My face feels like I’ve stuck my head out the window of an airplane mid-flight. Milk doesn’t help, water hurts, air hurts. Sitting hurts, standing hurts, everything hurts. I’m brain-neutral, save the one thing I’ve been asking myself for weeks.
“Why are you writing this article?” asks Martha Calvert, sensory manager at Colorado State University’s Food Innovation Center and Spur Campus. We’re most of the way through a video call at the onset of my spice journey, and looking back, it’s the best question she could have posed, asked by a person whose specialty — sensory experience — would be the literal answer to why any of us eat spicy foods.
Since this is Summer Scene, my idea was to write a piece where I turn up the heat by eating some of Boulder County’s spiciest dishes. I’ve always been obsessed with food: origin, preparation, presentation and, in this case, taste and effect.
“Spicy foods deliver this sensation we call chemesthesis, or the activation of the trigeminal nerve,” Calvert says. “It’s not quite taste, and it’s not quite smell, and it’s also not mouth feel. It’s this weird combination of things we don’t fully understand that are activating this nerve.”
At its literal core, molecules are triggering this chemesthetic response. It’s why you experience a cooling sensation from mint — that’s the compound menthol blowing a metaphorical fan onto your trigeminal nerve.
In spicy food, it’s the capsaicin molecule that’s doing all the “burning,” and the variance is extreme. In my quest for spice-induced enlightenment, I wanted to test two ends of the Scoville Heat Scale, the method of measurement used to determine the concentration of a pepper. The first, Efrain’s delectable chile verde, utilizes chiles ranging from 1,000-25,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU). The second, Peckish’s “Pledge Breaker” chicken wings, utilize two chili peppers that register 1 million to 1.6 million SHU.
A fiery flavor
Rich in history and proudly North Mexican, Efrain’s has remained a staple of Boulder County’s culinary sphere in Boulder, Longmont and Lafayette for over 30 years. Many a friend had recommended their tacos, drinks and happy hour specials, but for my first pilgrimage to their humble abode on Canyon Boulevard, I was in search of the dish they are most synonymous with — chile verde.
This green nectar of the gods has permeated Colorado’s culinary identity for eons, and Efrain’s stacks theirs up against any in the Centennial State. They put it on burritos, pair it with rice and beans, and in the case of my order, mix it in a bowl with tender pork, tomatoes and spices. Upon popping the top of the to-go container, I was greeted with a cauldron of sights and smells. Greens, tans, reds, browns, with strands and chunks of pork, bright red diced tomatoes, and the star of the show, the peppers — chopped to perfection, with seeds scattered throughout the concoction. The taste was a different experience entirely.
“I think what you’re kind of getting out of this project is what we call matrix effects,” Calvert explains. “When you eat a chili pepper, you’re not just eating pure capsaicin, you’re getting the crunch from the fibrous tissue of the pepper and some sweetness, earthiness, fruitiness, or maybe even floral characters.”
Calvert’s words played in my head as I let the first spoonful work its magic. Sure, there were other flavors at play, but the pepper did the heavy lifting. The spice was ever present, with a level of heat I would describe as “perfect,” inducing some sweat, cleared-out nostrils and a slight mouth burn.
What sat before me in my to-go order was a brilliantly spun web whose composition can be whittled down to the microscopic molecules of the tomato, the pork, the pepper and more, each one inducing a different chemesthetic reaction. Still, the capsaicin was doing the driving.
Soon, I’d find out, this very same molecule can grab the wheel with both hands and veer into oblivion.
Hell in a to-go basket
“Uhhhh… it’s the Liquid Lava, but it’s got reaper on it,” says the guy working the register at Peckish — one of Boulder’s premier wingeries on University Hill. I consider myself a wing aficionado, even having put myself through West End Tavern’s daunting “Wing King Challenge” for a story nearly two years ago. But as I drive home from retrieving my to-go order — a recyclable box of chicken sitting shotgun, filling my truck with an aroma I can only describe as pungent death — I can’t help but feel anxious.
Peckish’s president, Byron Wheeler, confirms for me the genesis of the wings I’m about to subject myself to, named “Pledge Breaker.”
“Our Liquid Lava sauce is a traditional red hot sauce with pepper flakes and habanero powder,” says Wheeler. “The Pledge Breaker sauce is half Liquid Lava and half Carolina Reaper sauce, dusted with a reaper rub. Our challenge to pledges is to finish six of them without ranch or anything to drink for 10 minutes. Many have tried, few have succeeded.”
The Carolina Reaper had, until this moment, been a mythical fascination for me. I’ve consumed sauces filled with ghost peppers or loads of habaneros, both of which had me sweating and breathing through cleared nostrils, but it was a level of spice I could handle, albeit at a slow and steady eating pace.
My slowdown reminded me of a study Calvert had referred me to by John E. Hayes, a professor of food science and the director of the sensory evaluation center at Penn State University, in which Hayes had participants eat various dishes with significantly different amounts of paprika in them, to monitor food intake and eating rate. When more spice was introduced, the amount of food and the rate at which it was consumed both decreased (by 18% and 17%, respectively).
It made me wonder — what would Hayes say about a level of spice that wouldn’t just slow intake, but stop it dead in its tracks?
There I sat, in the conference room of Boulder Weekly’s downtown offices, about to embark on arguably the most painful lunch break in company history. Without pause, I broke through the mental barrier and devoured wing No. 1. The flavor was immediate — a sweet burning habanero heat danced with the classic tang of red hot sauce, making for a nice experience that lasted roughly five seconds.
The Carolina Reaper powder put an immediate end to any semblance of enjoyment. The first couple minutes after consuming concentrated Carolina Reaper powder was like my trigeminal nerves opened the floodgates.
Every inch of my mouth, tongue to throat, was coated in fire. I was vocally paralyzed, for lack of a scientific term, and couldn’t muster anything more than “Holy shit,” or “That sucks.” I was surprised at how quickly I started crying, and both of my ears plugged, as if I had just swam to the bottom of a lake. The severity of the burn only increased for the next few minutes. My efforts to curb the pain with feeble remedies like water and milk were futile.
As the heat died down, I felt euphoric. Spice triggers the release of endorphins and dopamine in the brain, and due to the intense concentration of capsaicin of the wing I had just eaten, I was experiencing what some people call a “chili high.”
The question Calvert had posed to me at the beginning of this venture rang in my head: “Why are you writing this article?” I think I had finally found an answer, and it wasn’t the fact that eating these chilis had me on cloud nine. It was the environment they created.
“The sensory experience is so much more than how spicy something is,” Calvert said. “Is it also sweet? Is it also earthy? And when you’re eating the spicy food, what else is happening in that room? Are people watching you suffer?”
The allure of spicy foods, I found, wasn’t in the heat itself — I knew just as well as anyone how much pain these wings were going to cause me. It was the whole experience.
No one eats food this extreme by themselves. It’s commonly consumed in a bar or a restaurant with people you know, or in an interview on YouTube for millions to watch. The draw of spice is the community it creates, which explains why I wasn’t in our office conference room alone — I was surrounded by my teammates, eager to watch chaos unfold. Then, one by one, they joined in.
Arts editor Jezy Gray gave it a fair shake, and immediately started hiccuping. A minute after her first bite, reporter Kaylee Harter sat teary-eyed, staring into the void. Account executive Austen Lopp erased a coffee mug of milk, then another, and went to the hallway to walk it off. In the midst of capturing photos of the scene at hand, reporter Tyler Hickman carved into a wing and sweated it out with us.
At this point, my symptoms had subsided, but I couldn’t help but feel left out of the beautiful chaos unfolding in front of me. So, against all logic, I went in for another wing.