With the Super Bowl this weekend, Americans are gearing up for their own food extravaganza – with 1.40 billion wings served up on Sunday.
Any idea what brings the heat when it comes to hot sauce?
Whether your pepper of choice is ghost, Carolina Reaper, Scorpion or the mild sriracha, Sean O’Keefe, a professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Department of Food Science and Technology at Virginia Tech, says it’s the levels of capsaicin in the peppers that leave consumers with a tingling face and sweat streaked forehead.
The first bite of the chicken wing dripping with hot sauce doesn’t feel so bad. Flavorful, but has a bit of a kick. You take another. And then another. That sweet heat has now turned into a roar.
“When I get the right amount, I’m sweating and turning red. It’s just the physiological response,” O’Keefe said. “What the capsaicin does is bind to nerve receptors in the body and gives a sensation of burning.”
Extended exposure to capsaicin could make it more tolerable to the human body, O’Keefe said.
“There’s definitively a habituation effect where if people eat hot sauce all the time get used to it so it doesn’t bother you quite as much. I likely burned out my receptors long ago,” O’Keefe said. “But being hot for the sake of hot isn’t fun. Heat needs to have flavor.”
For a truly homemade hot sauce, try growing your own peppers, O’Keefe said.
“You can grow peppers that are otherwise hard to find in stores and experiment with how changing a pepper impacts your homemade sauce,” O’Keefe said. “Some peppers grow well indoors by a window, others do well outdoors.”
Tips for making your own hot sauce
When making your own flavorful hot sauce, as O’Keefe has done for years, there are a few considerations:
- Wear gloves when handling the peppers.
- Keep good records of hot sauces made as recipes can be continuously tinkered.
- At group event, not everyone likes spicy food. Have a hot and not-so-hot versions to appease the appetites of both crowds or have a classic barbeque or teriyaki sauce on-hand.
- Factor in your personal heat tolerance.
Sweet heat wing sauce recipe
Want to make your own wing sauce? Here’s a recipe to make your own special sweet heat wing sauce at home:
- Two pineapples
- Four mangos
- Two 12 oz packs raspberries
- Five 4 oz packages habanero peppers
- Juice of five limes, two oranges, two lemons
- Two cups cider vinegar
- 16 fl oz of maple syrup
- Five grams xanthan gum to keep solids in suspension
Grind the solids with the liquids in a blender until smooth. Heat to boiling and boil for 5 minutes.
Toss the hot sauce over the wings and enjoy.
Share
Crystal Graham
