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in-the-kitchen Pepper components

S

spicy.curry

In hot sauce recipes, sometimes they recommend discarding the seeds and placenta to make a milder sauce. Sometimes they recommend washing the oil away with water in the sink.

I haven't seen much discussion of the opposite - methods for making the sauces more hot - other than commercial extracts.

Discard a portion of the flesh, so that the sauce has more placenta? Get some extra oil in there - cut some peppers in half, add them to the vinegar, agitate, strain out the peppers?

On a tangent, in terms of pepper genetics and breeding, I think thicker walls are almost always better, even if they decrease scoville. You could trim away the flesh of a jalapeño with a knife, leaving mostly placenta, and you would suddenly have the equivalent of a much higher scoville pepper, but for most purposes we would rather keep that extra flesh. Why breed for such genetics if you wouldn't want to do the same thing in your kitchen with a knife?

Placenta could be a unique word to incorporate into the name a red pepper hot sauce.
 
To make a hotter sauce, use the same color of pepper, but in a hotter variety. Say you are making a sauce with the bulk of peppers being red jalapeno. Toss in a couple red (or orange as they a readily available at most grocery stores) habanero or red scorpion peppers to amp it up.

Same thing with green. Use some anaheim or poblano for bulk in the sauce, then add jalapeno and serrano for the heat. In my experience, most people go waaaaay overboard with hot chiles for the normal chilehead. 2-4 habanero chiles in a gallon of sauce makes a 2-4/10 heat sauce, which is in the heat level of 75% of sauce eaters. Very Few people can actually eat and enjoy sauces in the 8+/10 heat range. Depends on who is eating the sauce as to how hot to make it for your family and friends. A sauce that is 90% scorpion peppers would only be edible to a very few people.

Soaking in Vinegar sounds like a lot of work for not much reward. You can make 'infused vinegar' by soaking peppers, garlic, herbs, whatever in the vinegar, but I don't think the level of heat that will get into the vinegar would be appreciable. Partly because capsaicin is an oil and vinegar is ... well... basically water...and you know what they say about oil and water... :lol:

I Don't particularly like a lot of seeds in a sauce. chop, cook, blender the sauce as you like, then run it thru a food mill to remove the seeds and any large bits of skin. This makes for a smoother sauce and you aren't loosing any heat by removing the placenta and seeds which do have oils on them.

Don't try to peel the pepper, that just wastes a lot of product and sounds like a whole lot of work.

No Extracts! There is a product called Pure Evil which is liquid capsaicin drops that some people use to raise the heat without changing the flavor. It is made by (yours truly) so I hope I don't get sent to the SinBin for self promotion...

Have Fun!
SL


PS- HFF- you can probably send the candies to SW BioLabs in Las Cruces NM for HPLC testing. It used to be $60, not sure what it is now...
 
spicy.curry said:
I haven't seen much discussion of the opposite - methods for making the sauces more hot
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I actually have seen the opposite a lot. A lot of TV chefs say "And make sure to include the seeds because that's where all the heat is." No, that's not where all the heat is. There's only residual heat in seeds, where they were connected to the placenta.
 
Soaking in Vinegar sounds like a lot of work for not much reward. You can make 'infused vinegar' by soaking peppers, garlic, herbs, whatever in the vinegar, but I don't think the level of heat that will get into the vinegar would be appreciable. Partly because capsaicin is an oil and vinegar is ... well... basically water...and you know what they say about oil and water... :lol:
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I will have to experiment with transferring the oil to the vinegar. From past experience, a single scotch bonnet slice definitely heats up my margarita almost immediately.
 
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I make spicy vinegar, and vinegar pickles, and they are both spicy (even the brine). Maybe we're talking about efficiency vs. using a fat (you need more material to infuse)? I think vinegar can take the edge off the capsaicin in your mouth a bit (as can a cold drink).

I also find that dehydration lowers the spiciness, but long cooking (sauces) increases the spiciness. Maybe because the capsaicin is better distributed?
 
SatanicFlatIron said:
but long cooking (sauces) increases the spiciness. Maybe because the capsaicin is better distributed?
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There's multiple things at play so yeah. Volume loss (water), incorporation, etc. So yes there is cap loss in the air, and also, the sauce is more incorporated when cooked so it's always going to taste hotter as it cooks. The amount lost would not be noticed but it would technically be hotter if it was never lost. But it is negligible.
 
Of course vinegar 'works' with capsaicin, my comment was mostly that soaking peppers in vinegar is not an efficient method to get the sauce hotter. Use hotter peppers, or more peppers to other ingredients ratio.

IRT capsaicinoids- different pepper varieties have different amounts of the different capsaicinoids. I don't know of any comprehensive study of all the different chile varieties that lists which chile has which ratios of which capsaicinoids. Which would probably be irrelevant due to so many different factors such as growing conditions, soil, nutrients, etc. There are pepper reviews that talk about "back a' ma troat" and "caning". Watching some vids might lead you to trying a certain chile based on how it affects the taster.

SL
 
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