Food Theory: How To SURVIVE Spicy Food! (Hot Ones Challenge)

hey what's going on everybody for first week feast i'm shawn evans and you're watching hot ones it's the show with hot questions and even hotter wings and today i'm joined by matt pat that's right sean i snuck onto your show why because you've invited a bunch of other youtubers onto hot ones but never me what gives you so i have a food channel now right well you know what the hell that's right a food channel you probably thought i'd come on here and talk about super boring science stuff well i'm here to talk about super exciting science stuff now then i've prepared a presentation on the transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily v member 1. one very long presentation later and there you have it what do you think whatever but like at this point like you know it's hard for me to even look at a chicken wing [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the show that spices up science by peppering in puns so one show i resent not being invited onto i mean one show i enjoy watching online is hot ones which as you probably know combines celebrity interviews with pain by forcing both interviewer and interviewee to eat spicier and spicier chicken wings as the episode progresses i don't want to do that kansas don't know how to do no hot wings [Music] oh oh oh guess what got me god on their final interview question guests take on the infamous last dab sauce made from the hottest peppers in the entire world and uh i just so happen to have myself a bottle of the last dab sauce that i've been saving for a special occasion just look at that thing beautiful isn't it now if it seems like i'm totally brown-nosing the show it's because i totally am i wanna be on hot ones and just in case i ever do get called up to the big leagues i gotta be prepared that's why today steph and i are getting spicy uh ooh phrasing gotta try that one again uh that's why today steph and i are bolstering our spice tolerances and doing some spicy science today through good old research and experimentation we're gonna show you and ourselves how to stay cool while eating hot hot wings by testing the best antidotes the internet has to offer alright so we are here in the spice lab as i like to say it is our pale imitation of the first we feast hot one set okay so where are we starting in terms of like relative tolerance to spice i already know but you should say anyway i'd say i'm decent with spicy foods stephanie meanwhile i'm a wimpy the first step in our quest to make spicy a bit more icy is to figure out which spice antidotes to test on hot ones the go-to's are water and milk so we'll definitely be testing those but guests on the show are also welcome to bring in their own home remedies and they've brought in all sorts of creative spice chasers avocado alcohol thai iced tea donuts even straight up lemon juice and the internet has plenty of other suggestions too and i do mean plenty of other suggestions so in order to identify which ones we want to test we first have to know how spice works when we talk about the spice in a pepper what we're really talking about is the chemical capsaicin and yes i'm pronouncing it capsaicin because that's how miriam webster told me to pronounce it even though i have never once heard anyone in my life pronounce it that way capsaicin so if you don't like it take it up with both miriam and or webster when you eat a spicy pepper capsaicin molecules attach to trip v1 receptors in your tongue which trigger a pain signal to your brain in addition to spice trip v1 receptors also detect acidic conditions and hot temperatures in your mouth basically whenever they get activated the result is a stinging hot pain so if you've ever bitten into a jalapeno and felt like your mouth is burning well that's because capsaicin has activated the exact receptors that would tell your brain if there was an actual fire in your mouth in case you're wondering yeah you've got trypt-1 receptors all along your gastrointestinal tract and i do mean all the way to the end so if you've ever eaten something spicy and felt it later on that's why now the more capsaicin a pepper has the more trip v1 receptors it activates in your mouth and the spicier it's going to be on your tongue fans of hot ones know all about the scoville scale which describes the heat level of a pepper based on its capsaicin concentration for reference a regular old bell pepper has zero scoville heat units or shus a typical jalapeno might have 8 000 or so and the moruga scorpion pepper the hottest pepper known to mankind in 2012 and also the pepper from which my bottle of the last dab sauce is derived averages 1.2 million shus why did i specify the year 2012 by the way because the moruga scorpion pepper is no longer the hottest pepper in the world you see humans have gotten real good and real aggressive about breeding super hot peppers in recent years and as a result no pepper stays atop the pedestal for long since 2011 five different chili peppers have held guinness title of world's hottest pepper if you went anywhere near youtube in 2017 or 2018 then you're mighty familiar with the current record holder the carolina reaper which averages over 1.6 million shus the pocky one chip challenge it's made with a carolina reaper and there's only one in each package there's nothing to me so link has the hiccups instant regret rhett looks like he wants to die my tongue is about to fall off i don't know i just got my lips so yeah the race to make the world's hottest pepper has gotten fast and furious and hot ones has managed to keep up with it all the latest iteration of the last dab sauce is derived from pepper x which is rumored to have up to 3.18 million shus basically twice as hot as the carolina reaper although that's yet to be confirmed by guinness so alas dab sauce at least that spicy awaits me if i ever happen to be invited on the show which means that i have to beat capsaicin by dissolving it by overpowering it or even by soaking it up after seven rounds of testing antidotes steph and i will use that info to develop the ultimate spice chaser recipe and test it against the last dab sauce as our grand finale first up we tried soothing our tongues with good old-fashioned water an option made available to hot ones guests in like every episode should we cheers oh cheers cheers capsaicin like many oily substances is insoluble in water which means it doesn't dissolve in water so while cool water may feel temporarily soothing from a temperature standpoint it doesn't actually break capsaicin molecules down at a molecular level the way that some other chasers will be testing out today will i think i'm going to go ahead and drink the water because i i feel the burning my mouth is definitely at a heat level where i would be able to tell if it were reduced right oh yeah no totally nope while the water's in there it feels better but as soon as i swell it just comes right back actually yeah while it's sitting in your mouth and on your tongue it feels like it kind of like drowns it out for a minute or two yeah but uh but yeah as soon as you swallow it down it is it is no bueno on a scale of how effective was it f to a plus what would you say um uh what is the lowest passing grade d d d d for don't give that to me after something really spicy d for it didn't do a whole lot yeah exactly i was gonna say like c it's like didn't really do anything but at the same time like you know wasn't offensive i think we should move on to the next one all right next next we tried whole milk as our soothing agent milk is another go-to chaser in hot ones but unlike water it also comes highly recommended by science eighty percent of the protein in cow's milk is casein which does have the ability to dissolve capsaicin molecules this is for the same reason that soapy water is better at getting grease off a pan soap molecules surround and carry away grease molecules and so in theory does casein but in order to understand how well milk works we need to try it for ourselves oh yeah that's pretty darn good so again oh wow oh wow that actually does like because i feel where the where the milk didn't touch i still feel it burning like on my lips yep but in my mouth it's actually really nice and and neutralized it doesn't feel cold or anything but it feels cool it comes back certainly but slower and less strongly the pain so it's actually really pleasant i would give milk like a b plus or something milk did a really good job with the inside of your mouth and maybe keeping it cool for about 15 seconds i would say b plus two yeah i think so too so milk worked better than water but i'm not convinced a b-plus is gonna be cutting it against the last dab sauce so we continued with alcohol since capsaicin is soluble in alcohol science left us with little choice but to go in and buy some vodka we are actually not drinkers we just don't like the taste of alcohol actually and so we had to go out and and buy alcohol for this experiment because we don't just like keep high concentration alcohol on hand in our house we're what we call educational drinkers where we like learning about alcohol and taste testing a lot of them and learning about the history and being able to like identify interesting things in the flavors of them but when it comes to like actively seeking it out for enjoyment or just not those people we're not these people getting crunk in the name of science all right cheers cheers okay here we go there's no cup for this this is classy here on food theory we're classy stuff this is going to get us deep monitoring isn't it nostrovia we could always cut this one oh vodka oh that made it worse oh it didn't oh god why isn't it working oh geez whoa it's like everywhere and it's hotter why from a chemistry perspective i thought it was soluble what happened so much saliva in my mouth that i want to spit it out science is lying to me and i don't know why i'm gonna do some research and follow up in probably vo to explain why the state of wars thanks me i'll take it from here turns out alcohol is a bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to fighting spice it's true alcohol dissolves capsaicin but even an 80 proof alcohol like vodka is mostly water and on top of it it turns out that ethanol also activates trip v1 receptors which is probably why the vodka which is 40 ethanol added to our overall pain like i'm actually sweating after that one because it's like wow that made a lot worse i know that was bad oh that is terrible f f f's across the board round number four i hope it's a lot better uh this one's lemon juice so uh the rationale here is first off if you watch the gordon ramsay episode of first we feast hot ones he just downs this stuff by the boatload and so we're like well we got to test it out do you know anything about the chemistry here yeah so lemon juice is acidic that means it has a low ph and funny enough capsaicin is at least compared to lemon juice a base so in theory eating in food theory drinking a lot of lemon juice should help neutralize the capsaicin oh okay okay lemon juice okay ready cheers huh whoo over the teeth over the gums it is helping but also the lemon flavor is so tart so far and away lemon juice is the number one it's like a meat reducer right now yeah it's like a more permanent solution actually the downside to lemon juice is you're drinking lemon juice lemon juice thumbs up i would give that one i would give that an a a for me what about you a minus okay round number five sugar water matthew's too nice to tell you this but i've started burping a lot off of cat off camera it's really bad it's true but i i respect her privacy because women don't burp or pee or poop this is what i've learned now for this round we absolutely saturated room temperature water with granulated sugar that means we kept stirring in more and more and more sugar until the water couldn't dissolve anymore this home remedy is all about taste the sugar won't dissolve the capsaicin molecules the way the milk did for example but our research suggests that the sweet taste will simply overpower the spiciness and drown it out with a strong pleasant flavor wow that works really well that oh sweet relief literally good job good job cheers to that like as soon as i pour this in my mouth the spice just disappears it just goes away immediately almost entirely and it stays that way for a good couple of seconds when i swallow it then the spice creeps back unlike the lemon juice which kind of noticeably took it down levels every time i took a sip this one comes right back it comes back and it's at the same level in the first five seconds it's like an a plus and then after that it's like b minus it does dip off which averages out like a minus yeah it's true so there you go we agree we gave brett a shot because some home remedies claim that starches help soak up oily capsaicin kind of like a mop would we also saw gordon ramsay bust out donuts during his hot one's appearance so i'm curious to know whether those were entirely about the sweetness or if the bread itself does some of the legwork too but hey whether or not this one works it's just an excuse to eat bread and who doesn't love an excuse to eat bread oh look i made a stephanie sandwich oh my god shut up it's a stephanie sandwich and we quickly discovered that the bread alone was not gonna help this isn't really doing anything right the only thing this is such a ripoff what is this doing my mouth is so hot right now which is surprising because this is one of those really popular myths right that bread like that and you see people like shoveling it down it's not doing anything no it just tastes good after you eat a hot wing yeah it's actually less effective than water so i'd say this is like d finally round number seven here it is the grand finale the nectar of the gods diet coke how's your mouth feeling at this point okay i'll admit it there wasn't much scientific reasoning behind this one we just haven't have diet coke in the fridge and you know me i never turned down a chance to riot with the diet honestly we went into this expecting diet coke to be the worst of the bunch the idea of carbonation bubbles adding to the spicy pain just didn't seem all that pleasant diet coke for the memes for the tradition will the nectar of the gods cure us oh it actually works surprisingly well yeah turns out diet coke isn't half bad as a spice chaser way to go buddy i shouldn't have doubted you for a moment and there's actually a couple reasons for this first it's fairly acidic with a ph of about 3.2 which means that it's working in largely the same way that the lemon juice did second it had an overpowering sweet flavor that did the trick pretty nicely and the carbonation bubbles didn't really bother us like we thought they would it's interesting the carbonation gives your tongue i guess something different to feel on it and so you have these like bubbles popping in your mouth and so i guess your mouth is confused they say that the aspartame and diet coke is actually much sweeter than your mouth can actually even process yeah the sweetness actually does have an effect wow nectar are the gods man it's not one that like numbs it long term but as like an immediate solution it works really well so i'd say this one is like v plus territory yeah b b plus b yeah it's not it's not as good as lemon juice certainly and it's not as good as pure sugar water doesn't work no it doesn't work no the bread still doesn't work stuff so with all seven rounds under our collective belt steph and i reconvened in the kitchen to develop our ultimate spicy food antidote we kept a few key takeaways in mind one acids like lemon juice really seem to work best for permanently dulling spice pain two overpowering sweetness like the sugar water and to a lesser extent the diet coke really helped to kill off the spicy pain in the short term and third we both agreed that we shouldn't overlook casein as milk definitely dulled the pain as well so we looked into recipes that incorporated all three elements of our takeaway trifecta acidity sweetness and casein however this wound up being easier said than done since acids such as lemon juice cause milk to curdle when they're added together now we were able to find some drinks out there that technically accomplished the trifecta like brazilian lemonade which incorporates limes along with sugar and condensed milk but in this recipe a fair amount of water is also added in order to stave off curdling so it's a no-go weekly acidic liquids like coffee are able to combine with dairy and sugar but we found the acidity of coffee was too weak to make a difference against even our medium levels of spicy sauce since getting a lot of acidity and sugar and dairy looked to be out of the question we decided to focus on our two strongest performers acidity and sugar this eventually led us to a lime simple syrup which is essentially lime juice jam-packed with so much sugar that it takes on an oozy more viscous consistency steph and i found that not only did it taste great and kill off medium level spices really well but the additional viscosity was a huge help in stamping out spice pain because it hung around on our tongues a lot longer than runnier liquids especially when it was served cold now this whole simple syrup breakthrough got stuff to go on the viscosity train in a big way in fact she wound up ditching my solution and going off to make her own super viscous chaser using honey for its intense sweetness and peanut butter which provides plenty of oils to bond to the capsaicin so with our two spice chaser antidotes in hand there was nothing left to do then test them out against the final boss of the episode the last dab all right steph you ready i know i know how much you love spicy food are we gonna do a dab multiple dabs whoa ready ready ready one two three it's definitely hot oh oh my god there it is there it is let's get this going okay it's heating up i'm getting hot and sweaty i'm getting there are you drinking my drink oh i got got it oh it's definitely lingering in the back of my throat now okay i like it this is good i feel pretty good you can definitely feel the heat surging back into your mouth and it's a lot faster than with the the lesser spicy wings it happens a lot faster and it comes back much more intense but again i think my solution is working pretty well here's the thing the combination is actually the way to go really so putting that in your mouth okay it coats it gives you a different taste it gives you different sweetness but the peanut butter sticks on your tongue and actually holds some of the spice on there it does it's like a band-aid for your mouth uh-huh it's also delightful wow i noticed that oh god it's worse it took a long time to bloom it took a long time to get there but it's there i hate breathing yeah hashtag relatable there [Music] yeah breathing don't know so the other theory behind this was that a lot of thai food uses a lot of peanut in sauces in combination with a lot of spicy things so i thought that maybe it doesn't go away it doesn't no way so i thought that that maybe would help it doesn't even with both i like i like my drink i think i got to give the most points to my drink this is your drink is cold that's the thing that's missing i think from this now i'm not gonna sit here and tell you that the simple syrup or the peanut butter honey mixture was enough to completely neutralize the last dab sauce that spice kept coming back and with an intensity that honestly was shocking but we felt that we came a long way in separating the myths from the reality when it comes to combating spicy food and we've armed ourselves with the science that we need to compete in the arena with the big boys if i ever get tapped for hot ones at any point i am showing up with an arsenal of sugary lime water peanut butter cups and maybe even a swig or two of diet coke shawn evans doesn't know it yet but he's met his true match in science i'm ready whenever you are buddy but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit while we're on the subject of surviving foods check out our episode on surviving radioactive foods yeah we do that kind of thing on this channel too and the way 2020 is going might be wise to snag some tips for feeding yourself post-apocalypse so hit that subscribe button if that sort of content is interesting to you and if you do well then i'll hopefully see it next week for our next upload

Channel: undefined

Views: 4,445,989

Rating: 4.9502072 out of 5

Keywords: spicy food, spicy, food, hot wings, hot ones, spicy challenge, spicy food challenge, spicy noodles, hot wings recipe, hot ones game show, hot ones episode list, spicy wings, why is it spicy, spicy chicken, spicy noodle challenge, hot ones challenge, hot wing challenge, eating spicy food, spicy wings recipe, hot ones matpat, matpat hot ones, matpat hot wings, hot wings matpat, food theorists, food theory, film theory, game theory, matpat, game theorists

Id: v0So51Q6GLg

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/memunkey]

I've heard peanut butter works. Has anyone ever tried it?

[u/AFLoneWolf]

I just remembered that Sean had Michael from VSauce on to do much the same thing. Not with wings, but other spicy food.

[u/jvcscasio]

Diet coke problem is that I have to remove the taste of Diet coke later

[u/earth_worx]

Thinking maybe sweetened lemon yogurt. Already curdled, pretty acidic, add in some sugar...

[u/TheMatt561]

But it's just a theory

A FOOD THEORY!!

[u/BammingGamerX]

I honestly want to see Sean react to this and maybe get MatPat on the "Set" to try it himself

[u/FergusCragson]

Here's my untested (but I'm eager to try it) theory:

Ice cream seemed to be what worked for Sean and Michael of V-Sauce when they were testing heat remedies, and this Food Theory video confirms that peanut butter and honey work (as did the recent Hot Ones episode with Jessica Alba). Coldness also helps, as confirmed by all of the above.

And we can see that acidiic beverages can help.

So my theory is, get a bunch of peanut butter milkshakes, and some of that super-sweetened lime juice, and have both on hand -- a few gulps of one, then a few gulps of the other, or switch between wings.

[u/Hamburglar28]

MatPat is a YouTube OG! Get his ass on the show!!

[u/MABfan11]

didn't Mythbusters test this one?