Have you you ever eaten so much chilli that your ears started ringing? You couldn't talk? You went into a trance? Ben Rzoska — a former competitive swimmer for New Zealand, manager of a hotel health centre, and diehard chilli freak — certainly has.
One night at a Thai restaurant in London, Rzoska and his mate ate 67 side dishes of raw bird's eye chillies. "I don't know if my body started shutting down but I started off with sweats, running nose, which happens with a normal curry anyway, then I started to lose hearing," says Rzoska, who describes having "blurry vision", feeling "almost paralysed" and being unable to talk. (He also forgot to wash his hands after eating the chilli and going to the toilet: very painful.) "That night I was lying in bed and the room was spinning. I couldn't sleep properly after that for about two days."
Kiwi-born, and raised on a classic meat-and-three-veg diet, Rzoska developed his obsession with hot food once he left home, starting with Indian butter chicken. Two years into his "chilli career" he was scoffing vindaloos, then fuelling up on phals in London's Brick Lane. (Phals are scorchingly hot curries; the next level up from a vindaloo — log on to YouTube and you can see people trying to snort them.)
"That's probably one of the things my wife doesn't like about me is when I go too hard on the chillies," says Rzoska. "I'm not so social, depending on how long this trance I'll go into (lasts). It may last for five minutes; it may last for half an hour, where I can't communicate. I can't hear. I kind of know what's going on but I won't be able to physically talk or hear properly. There'll be a ringing in my ears." But, as Rzoska points out, he hasn't "done anything silly like deliberately rub chilli in my eyes".
Victor "Haggis" Vogt, who runs the Fiery Foods Festival (this year on February 14-15 in West Gippsland), claims that participants in his chilli eating competitions have passed out from eating too many chillies (although the heat, alcohol and dehydration probably play a part too). "I was up at the gate this year with the security and they're like, 'Haggis, Haggis, we need another ambulance, someone else just collapsed'."
"Everyone who eats a lot of chilli likes to take themselves to the limit," says Bruce Milne, who ran Hotsville, a hot-sauce shop in Prahran, from 1995 to 2000. "There's definitely the endorphin rush that you get from chillies and that's part of the fun of it. It's a cheap high. The feel-good part of your brain sends this sort of tingle through your body that's just, almost, like you start to float. And you start craving it. Once you've experienced it, you want to keep finding it."
Getting a buzz from plants is nothing new. American Indians are famous for tripping out on peyote found in cactuses, and many people have in-my-younger-days stories of euphoric (or horrific) experiences on magic mushrooms.
Ancient civilisations have long revered herbs and spices, using them as disinfectant (cassia and juniper), to preserve food (salt), to get high (belladonna, opium poppy) and as healing remedies. In the 14th century, American Indians used chillies to cure cramps. We now know that chilli has an anti-inflammatory effect on the body, is a digestive aid and is packed with vitamin C. Some research suggests that chilli can help control symptoms of diabetes and relieve PMS.
Spices were also shrouded in superstition, which is something Sarti owners Joe Mammone and Riccardo Momesso — both with Calabrian heritage — know all about. "In Calabria, chilli is like our flag, it's like our shield," says Mammone.
"The chilli protects you from the evil spirits." Mammone wears a chilli on his necklace and there's a chilli handle on Sarti's kitchen door. "Calabrians are known for their chilli and carry chilli in their pocket for weddings or for dinner. This is very old-school stuff, tradition. It's superstition but we grew up with it."
But for chilli-heads, it's all about chasing that high, and YouTube is rife with sober (and drunk) people snorting curries, vomiting after eating habaneros (extremely hot chillies from the Caribbean), and taste-testing chilli sauces.
Neil from the Hippy Seed Company, a self-proclaimed "YouTubian" and "qualified idiot", regularly posts footage of himself eating hot sauces sent to him by companies and chilli-heads from around the world. Each clip gives a firsthand look at some of the physical symptoms of eating hot chillies: a heavy sweat, glowing red face, hiccups, breathlessness, coughing, drooling — his glasses even fog up from the heat.
Phillip Leslie, owner-operator of West Australian chilli company Habaneros 4 Gringos, sent Neil a 45- gram jar of his Dragon's Aftermath, which he ranks as "10 double-plus" in heat intensity. "We found this guy on YouTube. He's a mega chilli-head," says Leslie. "I usually give people between a matchhead and a pea. Neil would have eaten well over 30 grams of it, I couldn't believe it. That's like getting half a kilo of habaneros and squashing them into a ball and eating them in one go. He's a blow-out."
"I've had that Dragon's in my eye twice," says Leslie. "It felt like red-hot sand was burning my eye. It hit me with such intensity I ran straight through the door, broke the door and the lock. The pain was so intense." Leslie says it can take four or five showers to wash off chilli dust after grinding up a batch of superhot habaneros. "The first batch of shampoo burns your whole body."
The chilli pepper is a member of the capsicum family and indigenous to Central and South America and the West Indies. "The heat is in the veins, not the seeds," says Leslie. "If you buy a habanero and tear it open you'll see the veins glow a bright orange, white, yellow, lemon. There are about 157 different varieties of the habanero."
Basically, the smaller and pointier a chilli, the hotter it is. At the mild end of the Scoville scale is the jalapeno (measuring about 5000 Scoville heat units). At the top end is bhut jolokia, ranked by the 2009 Guinness World Records to be the hottest of all spices and measuring 1,001,304 SHUs. In between are bird's eyes (about 250,000 SHUs), common to Thai cooking, and habaneros (which score about 350,000 SHUs), such as the red savina variety, known as the Devil's Tongue Pepper.
"A bird's eye is quite a sharp sting taste," says Milne, "whereas a habanero is just so extreme, it's like a slow explosion in your mouth that finds every single corner and lets you know it's there. A jalapeno is more like a back-of-the-tongue sort of taste." Chilli-head Warren Ingram agrees that the habaneros are a slow burn.
You often find your lips burning because the oil sticks to your lips and it's almost like someone burning you with a hot match or something. It's quite localised." Ingram's tip to combat the heat is to keep eating, don't stop. "Most people just go, 'it's hot, oh my God, drink lots of water, I can't eat it any more'. But you actually have to keep eating. The more you eat controls the heat."
Finding hot food in restaurants is a common problem for true chilli-heads. "I get really disappointed, I guess all chilli fans do, when you go into an Indian restaurant or a Thai restaurant and they say 'Do you want it hot?' and you say 'Yes' and then it comes and it's, like, this is so not what you would eat at home yourself. So my usual thing is, 'Could you make it as you would have it yourself?' " says Milne.
"Once you start eating chilli, because you crave it, you sort of have it fairly regularly," says Milne. "I couldn't imagine going a few months without it to see what it would be like when I try it again, because I want to have it."
LINK
Fiery Foods Festival
www.hsfff.com
http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/epicure/high-on-the-hot-stuff/2009/02/02/1233423129363.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
