The Hot Pepper Horror
(or: The Day YouTube Tried to Kill Me)

A few weeks ago, I saw a basket of peppers at the market—pretty little red things with green stems. I asked the vendor if they were hot. His response: “Just a little hot. They’re bird peppers.” So I bought a pound of Just a Little Hot Bird Peppers. When I got home, I went online looking for some way to preserve them.

And that’s when YouTube tried to kill me.

It showed me a happy man chopping up what looked like bird peppers, simmering them in olive oil and salt until they were caramelized, then shoveling them into his mouth like candy.

Here’s what the video didn’t mention:
*To chop up bird peppers, you need a hazmat suit
Turns out bird peppers are also called cayenne chile peppers.

They rank 50,000 on the Scoville heat scale. By comparison, jalapeños are a wussy 5,000 on the Scoville scale. By the time I’d chopped up the whole pound of cayennes, my hands were burning, my eyes were burning, and my face felt like someone was poking it with needles.

*When cayennes are cooked in oil, they release Death Vapors
Cayenne Death Vapors will make you cough uncontrollably, they’ll make you wheeze, they’ll make your skin itch and your scalp sweat. I opened all the windows and turned on the fume hood. It didn’t help. No one would come into the kitchen—not even the cats.

*Cayennes get very angry when you caramelize them
I was using a brand-new stainless steal frying pan that day. The cayennes destroyed the pan’s surface, leaving it dull and pitted. After the peppers had cooled, I put them into plastic storage containers. They destroyed those, too, leaving puddles of cayenne oil spreading across the bottom of the fridge.

*Cayennes can be lethal
I’m pretty sure the guy in the YouTube video wasn’t eating actual cayenne peppers. Because when he stuck one in his mouth, he was still able to talk—and to rave about how delicious they were. When I ate one, my lungs stopped working—no matter how hard I tried, I could not inhale until I’d actually swallowed the thing. And the flavor? Pain. It tasted like pain.

I’m still willing to caramelize peppers again. But next time, I’ll try something milder—like jalapeños. And I’ll get a hazmat suit.

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