As I travel to India nowadays, I find that I get “softer” with each visit. Food gets to me sooner. I love roadside food, the pani-puri, the chola-bhatura, the aloo-tikki frying tantalizingly in all that glorious oil. It’s hard though to enjoy all that without falling sick at least once – especially with water-based products like pani-puri. Which is quite a bummer because it can be said that I aspire to eat spicy foods. What is food without the spice ? What is food which doesn’t fuel the fire in your mouth ?

Here in the US, finding spicy food outside the house is a difficult task. You think Thai is spicy, I go Thai. And then when the waitress asks me what spice “number” I want, I go for the max – 5. She halts writing, peers at me, and mouths ungrammatical English, “Are you sure ? 5 very spicy”. Number 5 is not exactly tepid, but it’s not going to blow my socks off either. Still, it’s not a pretty sight; I’m not very girlie in these things. My eyes and my nose water; a tissue remains close at hand. As I spoon the food into my mouth I hardly ever break for water; it dilutes the zest. Needless to say, spicy food is always ingested only in the company of close friends and family; the others somehow don’t seem to appreciate a dripping female in the vicinity.

Really spicy foods are so few and far between that I want to list all the sources. The easiest source is the Chinese red pepper sauce. It’s available in the grocery aisles and at most Chinese restaurants. Made of red pepper (seeds and all) this is pretty potent if eaten in large enough quantities.

Another source, probably the fieriest of them all, is the jabanero (or habanero) pepper. This is a yellowish looking pepper (as compared to the desi green Serrano pepper) but the mild color is misleading. At my grocery store which lists the peppers along with their “hot” rating, this is at the max – a 10. The milder jalapeno comes in at a 7. The first time I ever had a taste of the jabanero was when I was at this Mexican restaurant, and we asked the server for something spicy. He wanted to know whether we wanted real spicy, and when we replied in the affirmative, went back into the kitchen and brought us a bowl of yellow looking sauce. He told us that it was not on the menu, as most patrons couldn’t tolerate it; it was made solely for the consumption of the mostly Mexican staff. He told us that it was called “mendiga”, that it was made of uncooked jabaneros (cooking a pepper takes the edge off), that it was dangerous. We were like babes in the woods; we had no idea. And it looked like mango chutney.

Needless to say that a little pin-prick of that stuff, caused minor explosions in the mouth, and later in the digestive tract. It was that good. And it is because of that mendiga, that I now buy jabaneros, and not jalapenos in my weekly grocery shopping. Where you had to use 5 jalapenos, 1 jabanero will suffice. And that’s less work, no ?

Another good place to obtain your fix of the “hot” stuff is “Wingstop”. This, as the name suggests specializes in buffalo wings and chicken tenders, cooked in their special sauces. Essentially they fry the chicken and dip it in a particular sauce of your choice. The first time I went in there, I looked at the menu and the people coming into the shop. Most of them ordered the “mild” (more people) or the “hot” (less people) version of their sauce. Other than that Wingstop also offered the “Cajun” and the “Atomic” sauces, in ascending order of spiciness, and nobody was ordering either. I ordered the “Atomic” wings, and the guy goes into the back room, and comes back with this tin of sauce, which he spoons out into a bowl, and into which he dips the buffalo wings. I’m assuming they don’t use this sauce very often.

“Atomic” describes the sauce very well. One morsel of that thing blew a hole in my mouth, and I consider myself a pretty well-seasoned (can’t help the pun) spice-eater. Eating 5 Atomic buffalo wings in quick succession required an emergency trip to the restroom, but I was eating all the way there. I must add that on my most recent tryst with Atomicity, 2 doses of Imodium A-D were required to recover from the wing-eating frenzy. I’ve been on milder food since.

So, denied most of the foods that threaten to rip to shreds the lining of my stomach, I go to my other favorite place – Taco Bell. And when the lady at the drive-by window enquires about the kind of sauce I’d like – Mild or Hot, I just smile up at her and say “Fire”.

Cross-posted on Desicritics.