'Pepper X' Creator Ed Currie Answers Hot Pepper Questions | Epicurious

I'm smoking Ed Curry I'm a professional hot sauce maker and pepper breeder I bred the smoking Ed's Carolina Reaper and pepper X and I'm here to answer your burning hot pepper questions [Music] help my mouth is on fire what do I do what do you do you enjoy it there's actually nothing you can do once you feel that heat that is a chemical reaction with a nerve receptor that our brain perceives as heat it's just going to keep on burning no matter what you do what you should not do is chug milk ice cream or things like that you're going to feel temporary relief and then as soon as you're saliva eat some carbohydrates which it does really quick you're going to be back to being hot again so you're going to eat more carbs then go back to being high eat more carbs even more carbs eat more carbs then you're going to regurgitate you're going to say oh that Pepper made me throw up and it's not it's the half gallon of ice cream you just ate in a three minute period if you want anything to happen get some citric acid you know pineapple juice lemon juice grapefruit juice lime juice put it in your mouth swoosh it around it's going to break up that oil that's holding the capsaisin it might make things a little hotter temporarily but it will get it out of your mouth and away from those receptors and you can either spit it out or put it down into your gullet what is the Scoville scale and how does it work the Scoville heat scale was originally how much water it took to dilute a pepper to the point where you couldn't taste any heat when we got into the 70s we had chemistry instruments that could measure the actual capsaicin in the pepper we dehydrate peppers and after a long and boring process we get the graph that we can use that mathematical equation and what it does is measure the heat of a pepper well Peppers kill my taste buds no Peppers will not kill your taste buds the reaction that you're feeling as a burn has nothing to do with your taste buds the heat that you're experiencing your mouth is not real it has nothing to do with your taste buds your brain's the only thing experiencing it and letting you know that that's happening the next question is kind of silly it says can I die from eating a hot pepper no you cannot die from eating a hot pepper with the caveat if you have a predisposition to an allergy to nightshades so if you're allergic Tomatoes or allergic to eggplant don't eat peppers okay they're all the same family can I overdose on the hot peppers I'm here to testify yes you can I've been so high on Peppers that I couldn't drive I've been so high on Peppers that I had to lay down on the coal floor and just sit there and shake for a while I'm talking about the same thing as a runner's high when the capsaicin gets into your bloodstream and gets to your brain it fills the dopamine receptors in your brain that narcotics do so it releases a huge quantity of endorphin and dopamine into your body the hotter the pepper the more that happens the more you eat the more that happens you get little tinglies all over your scalp and down the back of your neck and it's just like and you feel light euphoric it's it's almost like an out of body experience it's going to end in about a half hour and you can go back to whatever you were doing why are the seeds the spiciest part of the pepper there is no heat in the seed what is hot is the membrane that's around the seed and the pith that it's attached to let me give you an example we'll use this habanero right here always carry your pepper knife with you you never know when you're going to have fresh peppers so inside you see this white stuff here that is the capsaicin producing glands of the pepper the seeds happen to be next to it and they're not hot at all once you wash them and clean them is there a trick for getting the burn of the pepper off your eyes or your skin the only thing I've really found that helps to get it out of my skin is to take a little water and go outside and pour it on the ground get a mud going you plaster it all over your hands and you let it sit there for a little while and then you wash it off and it seems to work the best of all the wives tales I've heard I wouldn't recommend putting it on your eyes because who wants to get dirt in their eyes can I get better at eating hot peppers when I say get better at eating peppers I'm equating that to heat tolerance my experiences anybody can get better at eating hot peppers your body will become acclimated to the amount of capsaicin that you're consuming at any given time and then it will allow you to eat more always remember you start mild and then go to Wild do not dive into the deep end of the pool what is the hottest thing you've ever eaten well the hottest thing I ever ate was the standard capsaicin that we use to standardize the hplc machine before we're doing a test the standard that we use for the hplc machine is a powder that is 16.6 million Scoville heat units it was the stupidest thing I ever did my face was numb for a good four or five hours I looked like I was going to die there was just drool coming out of my mouth and all down my shirt my wife walked away from me it was horrible the second time I did it I just put some on my finger and I rubbed it on my gums and that was even stupider that one took like four hours to go away I was in a fetal position for most of those four hours and I did not know where I was it is the stupidest thing I've ever done how did you make the hottest pepper on Earth well I did make the hottest pepper on the earth I made smoking Ed's Carolina Reaper the cross between a pepper from the island of Saint Vincent called lasso free off the volcano there and a Pakistani Naga where I wasn't looking to make the hottest pepper in the world but the first time I tried the reaper it knocked me to my knees okay the next question is does hot sauce need to be refrigerated most of the hot sauces that are manufactured privately and done legally are going to be a pH between 4.0 and 3.6 if hot sauce is made properly and it has the right pH there's no need to refrigerate it the FDA says it's good for two years science that we use to test for the FDA says it's good for seven to ten years the reason why hot sauce makers put refrigerate after opening on a bottle is so you the consumer won't sue them the manufacturer if something goes wrong with the hot sauce 99.9 percent of the time when something goes wrong with the hot sauce it's because when people are using it they take the bottle of sauce and they go like this into their food and they're getting food particles on the bottle and in the sauce that grows into bad stuff but all of this hot sauces that are sitting on this table right now I would feel comfortable leaving all of them on the table for as long as I had that bottle open all right here's a silly question is Texas Pete a real guy if you've seen the character that is on the bottle and you find a man that looks like that I'll pay you 20 bucks okay I'll give you a hundred bucks the next question is can spicy foods cure a head cold I believe nothing can cure a cold but time can they make it uh less painful and less annoying yes they can by eating spicy foods you're going to have your mucous membranes run and it's going to drain that cold feeling out of you is it true that spicy foods can affect your metabolism well hell yes look at me I've been going since eight o'clock this morning eating spicy foods and I'm really ready to go I'm going to jog all the way back to Brooklyn scientifically the spicier the pepper the higher the effect that it has on your metabolism so if you eat say this poblano pepper nothing's going to happen to you this is a thousand Scoville heat units but if you eat this orange habanero which is about a hundred thousand Scoville heat units you're going to get about a 12 to 14 percent raise in your heart rate when you eat a really really hot pepper like the Carolina Reaper it's been measured at up to 40 percent increase in metabolism by eating those peppers for someone that doesn't normally eat pepper they're going to have a much more rapid increase in metabolism due to the fight-or-flight reaction than say someone like me who eats Peppers all the time is it true that Chili Peppers can be used in cancer research Chili Peppers have been used in cancer research for a long time when I started researching them I looked at populations around the world indigenous populations hadn't been westernized very very low experience in cancer and heart disease there is a subcapsinoid that has a key on it that when you get it to a cancer cell that has that Keyhole it'll start an autoimmune sequence they have been doing the research on how to do this me personally I think it's by ingesting massive quantities of super hot peppers every day but most chemo patients and people who have cancer are not going to be able to eat that much pepper so we let science do the science stuff we focus on the hot sauce can spicy foods induce childbirth down in Charlotte North Carolina there is a pizza place that has advertised that they have a child birth inducing Pizza some of the thoughts behind this that miter might not be true are that the increase in Metabolism from eating those super hot peppers is engorging the uterus with blood and helping speed along that process I can't see how that'd be true knowing a little bit about physiology but it's what they say I think it has nothing to do with nature or science how did you become a pepper expert am I an expert most people consider me an expert but I think what makes me an expert is that I know I don't know everything I studied it in school in the 80s and I got the literature I needed to keep on studying it and then I dabbled in processing in the 90s that Hands-On gave me more knowledge and understanding of the literature I was reading and then by you know the 2010s people were coming to me for answers instead of me going to them for answers well I hope you learned today something different about hot sauce or Peppers that you didn't know and I really really want you to remember it's always best to start mild and work your way up to wild you can always get hotter you can never go back this is smoking Ed Curry from Fort Mill South Carolina I'm signing off I love you all God bless you all have a great day foreign

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 675,541

Keywords: carolina reaper pepper, carolina reaper peppers, chile pepper, chile peppers, ed currie, ed currie hot peppers, epi, epicurious, hot pepper, hot pepper myths, hot pepper q&a, hot pepper questions, hot peppers, hottest pepper, hottest pepper challenge, hottest pepper in the world, hottest peppers, hottest peppers in the world, hottest peppers on earth, mustard apocalypse, peppers hot, smokin ed currie, world's hottest pepper, world's hottest peppers

Id: DbKUlXG90G0

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023