Weekend Plans Post: The Spiciest Food in the World

“Jaybird! We’re going out to eat!”, my bud told me. “There’s a new Ethiopian place! They have the coffee, Jay. The coffee!!!”

Now, I’ve written about the coffee I had in Qatar before… some blend of coffee and saffron and cardamom and cinnamon. They don’t strain it, either. It’s got the grounds there at the bottom. Just pour sugar on top and let it sink down to the bottom of the cup. It’s the most amazing coffee I’ve ever had.

And you do *NOT* want to drink it anywhere near time that you would like to sleep. 8 hours is not enough. Maybe 10? But if you’re going to be getting on a plane for a day’s travel well… it’s not like your sleep schedule isn’t already messed up.

So I got excited and said that I wouldn’t get the coffee but I loved Ethiopian food and Maribou said that she wanted to go too and so we all went out to dinner at The Taste of Ethiopia. It was a Tuesday night and lemme tell ya, if you’ve been thinking about going out to eat but hate the idea of crowds, go out to eat on a Tuesday night. The place was empty except for us.

Ethiopian food works like this: No utensils (well, unless you ask). They give you Injera bread. Lemme find a picture…

It’s like a light and fluffy bread that is grilled up. Halfway between a pancake and a crêpe. You pull off a small strip and then pinch some food off of the community platter. We got the lamb and the veggie plate and we were not disappointed.

There are about seventeen countries that claim to have “the spiciest food in the world” and while I haven’t tried all of them, I’d say that each of them that I have tried makes a very strong case.

Now, the spicy Mexican food that I’ve tried relies heavily on the jab. The jalapeño and its relations were my introduction to “spicy” and I now know that Mexican food is pretty much entry-level. I mean, it’s delicious and fun and a good jalapeño will make your eyes water but it’s like a punch to the nose. OUCH and then it’s over. You’ll blow your nose for an hour.

The stuff like Thai and Korean and some of the weirder Chinese dishes and Indian have all made me cry and they all share a lovely trait:

The first bite isn’t so bad. “Huh. I thought this would be spicier”, I thought. And then…moments later…”Oh. There it is.” Soon, after that, it becomes “I have made a terrible mistake.”

Those are the best ones.

Ethiopian spicy is a little different. It punches you at first and then recedes and then comes back. They make a Berbere sauce and serve it with Berbere powder and you dip your food in the sauce to make it wet and then dip the wet into the dry powder and that’s the spice. Dip a little if you want a little, dip a lot if you want a lot.

Maribou dipped a little and said “well, that’s enough of that” and just ate the food as it was prepared while me and my buddy went whole hog and devoured all of the Berbere they gave us.

I’ve heard that Ethiopian is the spiciest in the world but… well, I honestly think that that’s just something that most equatorial countries say these days.

If anything, the USA is probably the nation with the spiciest food in the world these days. We’re the ones with eggheads in greenhouses trying to come up with a 3,000,000 SHU pepper.

Pepper X, the current record holder, was bred by the guy who bred the Carolina Reaper, the previous record holder. He’s a crazy guy in South Carolina who is going out of his way to find nirvana. More power to him.

I mean, the USA is the country that invented the “One Chip Challenge” that, sadly, has killed a guy. (Seriously, the autopsy specifically mentioned the spicy food as being the cause of a heart attack.)

So I’d say that the US has the spiciest food.

But it’ll probably never appear on any official lists. Ethiopia will be on the list… but it’ll be down around #12 or #13, I think.

Absolutely delicious, might I add… but, you know, it’s not the spiciest.

This weekend will have me making food for Canadians. As such, the spices will be stuff like “garlic” and “rosemary” and we’re in the double digits on the scoville scale at worst. But that’s okay. I can add hot sauce.

So… what’s on your docket?