[Sca-cooks] Hot Peppers

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

KazOShea at aol.com wrote:
>I had helped recently helped cooking with a Mongolian feast

Any chance that redactions can be posted to this list?

>Things in the recipes that yielded hot/spicy results included ginger,
>galangal, coriandor, cumin, ginger juice, long peppers.

Sounds yummy, but galangal, coriander, and cumin are not hot (unless
someone has very blond taste buds :-) Add to spicy flavor? Yes.
Pedas? No.

The ginger juice and long peppers responsible for the hotness.

>Another thing to consider for souteast asian is also curry powders and masala
>seasonings. No chili peppers found in those.

There aren't really many curry powders or masalas in Southeast Asia
except in the Tamil and other Indian sub-cultural groups.

"Curry" is the very unfortunate translation of several different
words for certain types of spice blends in Thai, Indonesian, etc.
Sure, they are spice blends, but they're not curries.

And a masala is a very particular type of spice blend found in
particular regions of South Asia.

Unless you're are for some reason using these terms awfully
generically, which to my mind, as a cook and student of culture, is
inappropriate.

Oh, yeah, and "Chai Tea" drives me NUTS!!! (and i was already close
enough to walk)

"Chai" MEANS "tea". That's like saying, i'll have a cup of coffee
coffee. The significant word has been dropped - masala. The spicy tea
that is now popular in a grotesque form (with honey and vanilla!?!?!)
is really "Masala Chai" (sweetened with sugar, dammit, and without
vanilla, dammit).

You know, vanilla is good where it belongs, but is has become a food
and perfume pollutant. I probably wouldn't mind so much if it were
all real natural vanilla, but all too often foods and perfumes are
polluted with synthetic vanillas.

>There is cinnamon and saffron. I had made an eye melting but tasty chili in
>the past and what had pumped up the heat a lot were the two cinnamon sticks
>that I had tossed into the mix.

Huh? How can two sticks of cinnamon make a dish hot? Spicy? Yes. Pedas? No.

And saffron? Fragrant (i adore saffron), but not hot.

I guess your taste buds find things to be hot (pedas) a more easily than mine.

>Iago
>"if it don't make you sweat it's not hot enough yet"

Cinnamon, coriander, cumin, galangal, and saffron just aren't gonna
make me sweat. They are not hot (pedas). They just add flavor. Heat -
now that can come from masses of raw garlic, lots of ginger (fresh or
dried but not stale), various peppers, various capsica, a few other
spices like andalimon/Szechuan pepper/their relatives, grains of
paradise (aren't those somehow related to cardamom?).

Anahita
who is much more of a "heat" wimp than she used to be, but still ain't no wimp

And buzzed from *decaf*!!!