【海外の反応】タイ・メキシコ・インド料理、なぜ「辛さの刺さり方」が全部違うのか問題

being indian i always thought my spice tolerance was literal god tier. like the curries my family makes would probably put a victorian child in a coma. so when my roomie brought home those 3x spicy korean buldak noodles i was like "lmao watch this". bro. indian spice is like a warm hug that slowly turns into a hot sauna. korean spice is like getting pepper sprayed directly in the tonsils by a swat team. i was literally crying over the hostel sink drinking cold milk straight from the carton while my roomie laughed at me. completely humbling experience tbh. diff countries really do weaponize their chilies differently.

It comes down to which chilis they’re using and how. But mostly, the difference is in the amount. Mexican food tends to have some spicy items (like sauces) that go on non-spicy things. Thai food tends to have a crapload of peppers right in the broth so it’s unavoidable.

Edit: reading after this, I read that part of why Southeast Asia embraced chilis in so much of their cooking when it was introduced (it came from the Americas… I can’t even imagine what Thai food was before spicy), was that it helped preserve warm food in the tropical climate. Plus if it’s really spicy your face sweats and stuff, and that feels good in a breeze on a hot day.

Compare this to chili cooking in the Americas, where they have a lot of varieties that aren’t super-duper spicy. They’re all about smokin’ them and roasting them and the flavor of them… Asian cooking is mostly in it for the spicy.

Type of chilli and method of cooking. Just from your examples: Thais put whole chillies directly into broths and stew it, Mexicans use ground chillies in meat heavy dishes, Indians use chillies in combination with other spices in butter and ghee. Each method extracts different kinds of flavors out of the chillies

There are a combination of factors.

The biggest one is the choice of chilis and how they’re used. Different peppers have differing degrees of spiciness (for example, the bird’s eye chilis typically used in Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Indian cuisine are around 50k-100k on the Scoville scale, while the poblano peppers typically used as mild chilis in Mexican cuisine only rate around 1k-1.5k), and how much is used and how it’s used matters a lot. Thai cuisine tends to use more of the peppers by weight on top of usually using hotter peppers, and often cooks them in a way that causes the heat to spread throughout the dish, while Mexican cuisine often uses smaller amounts by weight and frequently cooks things in a way that the heat stays more localized.

Additionally though, the other properties of the dish matter, sometimes quite a bit. The most significant aspects are how oily/greasy the dish is, how acidic it is, and what other ingredients are in the dish.

Almost all compounds that give things a strongly pungent flavor, including capsaicin and it’s derivatives (found in chili peppers), piperine (found in black/white pepper), gingerol and shogaol (found in ginger), allyl isothiocyanate (found in mustard, wasabi, and horseradish), and allicin (found in garlic) are significantly more soluble in oils (and alcohol) than in water, so dishes with lots of oil or fat tend to have these flavors diffuse through them much more readily. Additionally, the oils/fats will tend to stick around in the mouth more readily, meaning that the heat will tend to stick around too.

As far as acidity, that’s a bit more complicated. Most of the compounds mentioned above trigger the TRPV1 or TRPA1 receptors in your mouth (or whatever other body part you get them on). As the degree of acidity goes up (that is, pH goes down), the rate of activation of those receptors goes up, and the rate of deactivation goes down, meaning that they will trigger more readily, and they will stay triggered longer. This has the practical effect of making the heat hit harder and stick around longer. Note, however, that this on it’s own doesn’t override other factors. For example, pickled chilis are often milder than fresh chilis of the same variety in spite of the acidity because the capsaicin leeches into the brine over time, and you’re not usually getting much of the brine alongside the chili.

And then you have other ingredients. There are literally thousands of ways this can impact things, but the two biggest ones I know of off the top of my head are dairy and mint. The casein in dairy products, especially cheese, limits how capsaicin interacts with TRPV1 receptors, which blunts the perceived heat (this is a major part of why a glass of milk helps more than a glass of water when you eat something extremely spicy). And the menthol in mint acts as a natural analgesic, which is relevant here because the TRPV1 receptors are actually pain receptors, so having a lot of mint in a dish with chilis will also blunt the percieved heat (though because menthol tends to have a shorter effect than capsaicin, it will often do so more effectively initially but still leave a lingering heat).

Excellent description. They all do hit different 😂. Jamaican and Caribbean too.