311–320 of 336 posts
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No, you're correct -- jalapeños have always been the least-spicy spicy pepper in an average US supermarket. It's just that they used to be spicier. But if you wanted something really spicy, you never bought jalapeños even in the past -- you went for serranos or habaneros if you could find them.
Are bell peppers not peppers? Surely a bell pepper is the least spicy.
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Bitterness is quite literally the "this is poison, stop eating" taste category that incidentally happens to have a lot of false positives because for the most part it's cheaper to reject some good food than to accept eating some poison. An ironic thing to say in a thread about peppers, but still.
And much much more false negatives, which raises the question if the "stop eating this, this is bitter and bitter means poisonous" has any truth in it.
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Sounds like location (and with it tomato source/variety) is what's changed, not time (and tomatoes over it). I always regret it if I get them out of season; in season they're still worth paying extra for, cheap bottom of the barrel supermarket tomatoes are just mildly flavoured water capsules. That's in the UK; for some reason even the cheapest in France has always seemed to beat anything we can get here.
> with it tomato source/variety yes that's the entire point of the discussion, they chose varieties based on quick growth, disease resistance, water needs, ease of transportation &c. taste isn't anywhere close to the top of the list
'variety' as in among those that are available - maybe what you can get grown easily and cheaply in Greece/med is much better than that in the US, which is perhaps also local but necessarily (or for better yield) a different variety, so if you don't pay any attention to it you get something different.
My point is it's not just passage of time that changed but also where they came from. If you think all tomatoes everywhere are (now) tasteless and you're one of the few enlightened ones who have realised this, you are absolutely kidding yourself.
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Less spicy is actually good. I prefer more flavorful chiles, with less spice. Mark Miller's conversation with Tyler Cowen is good on this subject: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/mark-miller/ . Chiles are actually fruits and, combined judiciously, create a lot of complex flavors. Excess spiciness overwhelms the flavor. And people who want absurdly spicy peppers, can get them: ghost chiles, carolina reaper…
I really wish we could have a habanero that is 1/4 as spicy. I LOVE the flavor of habaneros but their spiciness prevents me from putting too much. That said on the flavor/spiciness scale a lot of the Chinese varieties are excellent. The chili peppers used in Sichuanese cuisine are actually not that spicy compared to habaneros or Thai chilis, which allows it to be possible to dump a bag full into a dish and it gives i…
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Wait, does yeast break down capsaicin? That doesn’t make sense to me since I make a lot of extremely spicy fermented, hot sauces, and they don’t lose their heat.
With water and salt? That should be lactic acid fermentation by bacteria, no?
The reason I took away from this: large agricultural producers of peppers bred towards a "low heat, low variance" standard, away from a "high variance" standard that produced frequent hot jalapenos. Low-heat-low-variance is better for mass food production, because producers can just dose the capsaicin directly, which is something they can't do easily when every pepper is a wildcard. There are second-order effects, li…
They're less gross than they used to be, but they're still pretty gross.
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Yes - mushrooms and olives on pizza used to be a crime against humanity. I don’t think Papa John’s invested in higher quality toppings.
I'm not so sure. I feel like the quality of fast food ingredients has gone up since the 90s. I have a couple of theories: I think consumer preferences have pushed in that direction (e.g. I remember McDonalds chicken nuggets used to have chewy gristle in them), and JIT inventories mean that ingredients can be fresher, and food science (e.g. additives and preservatives) has improved, and improved flavor along with it,…
Interesting. My impression has been the exact opposite of that. Ingredients seem more uniform, true, but they also are much less flavorful and seem to be higher in salt than ever.
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I don't mind steamed sprouts today, but I remember how utterly repulsed I was by them as a kid. The preparation doesn't make a ton of difference, in my opinion.
Overcooking will increase the bitterness, the preparation makes a ton of difference. I don't really recall how my mom might have cooked broccoli and such, but I certainly identified things she did cooking that were not ideal as far as outcomes (and I would say she was a reasonably good cook).
The spread of such information/science in recipes has increased from the slower era of cookbooks and newspaper columns.
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Don't season your pan with EVOO, its smoke point is too low. Avocado oil works well for seasoning.
What does smoke point have to do with it? What you want is a high iodine value. Both avocado and olive oil have low iodine values, and they’re premium oils, so doubly wasteful for cast iron seasoning.
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The bites themselves don’t cause the plant to produce more capsaicin. It’s natural selection - plants in areas with lots of insects end up producing more capsaicin as a means of protecting themselves. They are hotter, and insects will not bite them as a result. Happy to be proven wrong if you have sources saying otherwise, but I’m quite certain this is the science behind it.
This is basically the same as arguing that exposure to sunlight won't darken your skin, but it will mean that natural selection gives your descendants darker skin. There is every reason to expect that a plant's defenses against predation will be more active the more predation it experiences.