Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce / Real Life

In Real Life, there are generally two classes of spice substances that can be considered in the realm of Blazing Inferno: Capsaicin and Allyl Isothiocyanate spices. See the Analysis page for more information.

Capsaicin Spices

• A restaurant in Tallahassee, Florida, was once shut down by the Leon County Health Department on charges of toxic chemical contamination (and the owner cited for Reckless Endangerment) after they began featuring food that had been spiced up with one of the pure capsaicin "sauces".
• Enjoy this profanity-laden anecdote about food allegedly including some of that pure sauce. Long story short, a guy who loves insanely spicy food hears about a hot curry challenge and decides to take it on for his brother's 30th birthday. If he can eat the whole thing, his group gets their food for free. He gets served a curry with several drops of Blair's 6 am reserve that's insanely painful to eat even for him, but he finishes the whole thing. His digestive system is not happy the next day.
  Warning - this product may cause blindness, insanity or death. Oh, and it will make your anus feel like Hades.
• In Minneapolis, there's a place called Marla's Caribbean. It serves Ghost Pepper Wings - buffalo wings made with ghost pepper sauce. Bear in mind, ghost pepper is usually applied with an eyedropper.
• The phaal (also spelt phall), a British Bangladeshi specialty whose selling point is that it's basically meat in Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce. Although it does often use copious amounts of a variety of chilies (easily including Dorset Nagas aka a kind of ghost pepper), the fact that it also uses ginger, brown mustard seeds, and black pepper should also be noted. Yup — there's no hot button unpushed.
  • Most curry houses don't actually list it on the menu but will serve it if you specifically ask for it; the chef will wear a gas mask to prepare it and the staff will look on warily as you eat. If it's anything to go by, it's hotter than the vindaloo, and even that's overpowered to the tongues of many. According to Jasper Carrott, the phaal is so-called because the usual response after eating it is "FFFFFFFFFFFFFF... I'll be all right...". The Geordies attempted to one-up it with the even hotter 'magmaloo', which according to Carrott comes in a bowl made of Space Shuttle re-entry tiles, comes with a side order of Savlon, and has a tendency to melt spoons. And fillings.
  • Another legend is that "phaal" is a Bengali word meaning "stupid drunk white man". (It actually appears to mean "jump", which is… accurate.)
  • There's a curry house in Edinburgh that held a phaal-eating contest that ended up hospitalising several of its contestants. Said curry house has clippings of the newspaper story in its window as advertising. Possibly the only time "our food induces vomiting" has been cited as a positive quality.
• Jeremy Clarkson once wrote an article called "Help, quick - I've unscrewed the top on a ticking bomb" in which he ingested one of these and rapidly realized his error.
  Burns victims often say that when they are actually on fire, there is no pain. It has something to do with the body pumping out adrenaline in such vast quantities that the nerve endings stop working. Well, it wasn’t like that for me. The pain started out mildly, but I knew from past experience that this would build to a delightful fiery sensation. I was even looking forward to it. But the moment soon passed. In a matter of seconds, I was in agony. After maybe a minute I was frightened that I might die. After five I was frightened that I might not.
• In west Africa; almost any cut of meat may be served in a concoction known as "pepper soup" that is based on a spice mix which combines scotch bonnet chilis and large amounts of black pepper. It is successful in covering the taste of the meat, as well as everything else for the next week.
• On a different note, South Africa has, since the mid-2000s or so, become world-renowned for its sauces prepared from the very spicy African birdseye or peri peri pepper.
• Korean kimchi—typically consisting of fermented napa cabbage (that is to say, it's almost sauerkraut), but with a massive hit of spice, particularly very hot chili peppers. It was once described as "the culinary equivalent of undead", and indeed the traditional method of kimchi preparation bears significant similarities to Haitian folklore's description of how to make a zombie. Several varieties (of kimchi, not zombies) are just painful to even smell, let alone eat. South Korea has very low rates of intestinal parasite infection and tooth decay, but also high rates of stomach cancer; however, the blame for this latter goes to the nitrates kimchi contains, not the hellfire spices.
• Ah, the spicy food of China! Chilis have become very popular across China since their introduction around the 17th century (give or take a century). Three neighboring provinces in the interior south of China have developed a particular reputation for high-Scoville cuisine: Sichuan, Hunan, and Guizhou. Sichuan is noted for its málà "numbing-spicy" flavors, using the region's indigenous sanshool-bearing Sichuan peppercorns to balance the intense use of chilis. Hunan, meanwhile, has built its reputation on oily, garlicky dishes with lots of cured, smoked meats and just an overload of chilis. Finally, Guizhou is noted for its sour-spicy food (featuring a lot of pickled vegetables), which is if anything spicier than the other two, but which goes that goes remarkably well with the ridiculously powerful local liquor (Maotai, China's most famous form of baijiu—that's "white liquor", made from sorghum and distilled to a strength that makes Russian vodka look like light beer—is from Guizhou). The Chinese have a saying: "四川人不怕辣, 湖南人辣不怕, 贵州人怕不辣 (Sìchuānrén búpà là, Húnánrén là búpà, Guìzhōurén pà búlà.)" — "Sichuan people are not afraid of spiciness, Hunan people don’t fear eating spicy food, no matter how spicy it is, and Guizhou people are afraid of eating food that isn’t spicy." With that in mind, a catalogue of spicy dishes from the Middle Kingdom:
  • Mapo doufu is a classic of the Sichuan mala flavor profile. It consists of tofu and (usually but not always) ground meat in a bean-based sauce heavily seasoned with chilis and Sichuan peppercorns. That Other Wiki describes it as "powerfully spicy" (using those exact words).
    • It's popular enough in Japan to show up as the go-to example for hotly spiced food in anime, manga and visual novels, such as in Angel Beats!! and Fate/stay night.
    • Iron Chef Chen Kenichi, who specializes in Sichuan cooking, usually toned down his mapo doufu when he made it to better suit the palates of the (mostly Japanese) judges. In the King of Iron Chefs tournament, when he took on Kobe in Battle Tokyo X (a type of crossbred pork), he decided that since it might be his final battle, he'd go all out and make his mapo doufu how he'd have it, i.e. extra spicy. One of the cameramen who stood too close to it started coughing just from the fumes and had to pull away. Sumo Yokozuna Akebono (who, perhaps significantly, is American—he's from Hawaii) enjoyed it though.
  • One traditional variant of "Chinese Chili Chicken" requires you to heat a pot of peppers to boiling point, then cook the chickens in it. It basically fries the chicken in chili oil, with little else seasoning it. Diners are expected to eat only the chicken, but most people eat the peppers anyways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this dish is generally associated with "Indo-Chinese" cooking (not in the sense of dishes from "Indochina", but rather from Chinese people/people of Chinese descent in India and catering to Indian tastes).
  • Another Sichuan dish is innocently called (translated) "Water Boiled Fish". What the name omits is that said water is basically a broth of the hottest chilis the chef can get. The fish is indeed boiled in the water, but as they usually select whitefish for the dish, it results in the fish taking on tremendous heat. Much like the Chili chicken above, you're only expected to eat the fish, not the chili and most certainly not the broth, but some people do anyways as one side effect of Sichuan cooking is that it makes you addicted to the high heat, even if you're not normally a chili eater. Since The '90s, this dish has been overtaken by a variant similarly innocently called (translated) "Pickled Vegetable Fish"—which is just "Water Boiled Fish" with Sichuanese pickled mustard greens added (adding some delightful fermented sour-savory flavors but doing nothing to cut the heat).
  • There are two dishes—one from Sichuan, the other from Guizhou—that go by the name laziji—literally "spicy-thing chicken". They have very little in common other than being very spicy and involving chicken:
    • The Sichuan version involves small cubes of battered fried chicken. Once deep-fried, the cubes are stir-fried with dried chilis and some dry spices. The whole mix—including the dried chilis—is then plated and served. Like the Indo-Chinese chili chicken and water-boiled fish, you're not supposed to eat the chilis, but some addicted chiliheads do anyway.
    • The Guizhou version calls for larger cubes of chicken, usually bone-in, braised in a spicy sauce based on ciba lajiao (a traditional Guizhou fermented chili paste).
  • The Lao Gan Ma chili crisps in oil that have become popular in the West since the late 2010s are a commercial preparation of a traditional Guizhou condiment. While Lao Gan Ma isn't known for ludicrous spiciness, homemade varieties of chili crisp in Guizhou are as spicy as people want, which can be mighty spicy.
• In 2007, part of central London was evacuated when fumes from a Thai restaurant cooking up a large batch of chilli sauce sparked fears of a chemical weapon attack.
• Similarly, in 2013, the producers of America's favorite brand of sriracha sauce—not a particularly blazing hot sauce^note It's made of red jalapeños, which are kinda spicy, being jalapeños, but not especially, and unlike the green jalapeños you often see, they're fully ripened and so under the heat have a wonderful sweet flavor not unlike red bell peppers.—were sued by residents of the California town in which their factory is located on the grounds that the fumes from the plant constituted a public nuisance and had caused some citizens breathing trouble (the court eventually decided that the evidence was insufficient to show a nuisance, but that the suit was brought in the first place and wasn't thrown out for being frivolous is impressive...).
• A few manufacturers of overtly spicy sauces:
  • Blair's, who created the one that once illustrated the main page (and the maker of the sauce described in the anecdote linked near the top). Best part? It's not even their strongest. They even made a limited edition product with pure crystallized capsaicin, reaching 16 million Scoville units - several times hotter than pepper spray.^note This was intended to be a collector's item and little else - unless you're preparing massive quantities of food for a party or a similarly large event, one crystal will render the food virtually inedible for all but a select few chiliheads, and even they will find themselves in great discomfort; one crystal in a gigantic batch of food will merely render it monstrously hot. Skin contact with a crystal will result in extreme irritation, and anyone who is actually willing to use it should use tweezers to handle the crystals.
  • While we're on the subject, police-issue pepper spray can easily hit 5 million Scoville units. One part pure capsaicin to two parts aerosol propellant, but your eyes won't be feeling very much of the dilution.
  • Maitland, Florida restaurant Tijuana Flats, whose hottest sauce (Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally - Chet's Gone Mad) is about 1.5 million Scoville units, more than enough to actually feel burning on your skin if you placed some on there. They've even included a disclaimer that they consider it strictly a food additive and should not be used as a condiment.
  • Nicko McBrain's restaurant Rock N' Roll Ribs (also in Florida). The escalation even uses songs from Nicko's band to lampshade: it started with Mild, Medium, Hot, Run to the Hills. Then it became Mild, Medium, Hot, Die with your Boots On (which replaced RTTH after one complained it wasn't hot enough), and Heaven Can't Wait.
  • While not the hottest sauce on this list, Da Bomb Beyond Insanity has received viral fame due to its The Dreaded status among Hot Ones guests, and it is almost always the point where guests display signs of significant discomfort. At 119,700 Scoville units, it's still extremely hot, but the real pain comes from the use of pepper extract, which leads to its notoriously bitter taste (often compared to cleaning chemicals) and extremely potent and long-lived burn. The result is a sauce that takes a bit to make its presence known, but hurts quite a bit more than many sauces with a higher Scoville score and just does not subside in anything resembling a reasonable timeframe and also leaves a nasty aftertaste as an extra middle finger to remind you of your bad life choices.
• Many restaurants specializing in hot wings will offer some sort of challenge to anyone who can eat a certain number of their hottest wings in a fixed amount of time. Some up the ante by saying that the customer is not allowed to consume anything else within five minutes that would counter the burn.
• In 2015, Buffalo Wild Wings offered a ghost pepper-based sauce, and later reformulated their Blazin' sauce, the hottest on their menu, to use ghost peppers as the heat source. Later that was discontinued and the Blazin' sauce was instead made with Carolina Reaper pepper.
• Continuing their legacy of spicy foods, Koreans are proud of their insanely hot instant noodles. One particular brand is Samyang Foods' Buldak Bokkeum Myun (lit. Hot Chicken Flavor Ramen), which earned international fame as several people on YouTube try to consume these noodles as part of the "Fire Noodle Challenge". In addition to the large amount of different flavors of Buldak, there is a double spicy variant aimed at those for whom the original flavor is not spicy enough, then a triple spicy variant in 2019. There was a brief moment in 2018 when a half-spicy variant was made for people who enjoyed the taste but not the level of spiciness, but it didn't last.
  • In case you're wondering: r/spicy loves 1x and generally thinks 2x is about the limit. And even they think 3x (or 2x with added hot peppers) is way too much heat.
• Dark Bunny Sauces use many very hot peppers—and three have heat ratings that are (literally) up to eleven. Behold someone trying Terrified Trash Panda.
• Turkish chilis make the likes of jalapeños or most anything without them look like child's play. For diners who wish to try them, one: you will look like the biggest man or woman in the room, and two: once that feeling goes they are an exercise in sheer torture even for the prepared seasoned spice eaters.
• Ed Currie, official Mad Scientist of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company (and yes, that is really his title), has taken pepper-growing to a level that will make you realize that there is such a thing as mad botany. Although he was originally breeding peppers with lots of capsaicin for medical purposes (as stated elsewhere, capsaicin has certain medical uses as a topical analgesic for muscle pain and certain kinds of neuropathy), said capsaicin-filled peppers are also, of course, really really hot. He's the guy behind the Carolina Reaper, the former world record holder for hottest chili (averaging 1.5693 million Scoville units, but can reach over two million, which, for reference, is hotter than most police-issue pepper sprays), and he's also created Pepper X, which, as of 23 August 2023, has been recognized as the hottest pepper on the planet that averages out at 2.69 million Scoville units, nearly double that of its predecessor. Because of how new it is, it's currently only used in Hot Ones' The Last Dab hot sauce. Both peppers taste rather sweet at first, and release fiery hell on the taste buds afterwards (Ed himself has compared the experience of eating a Carolina Reaper to eating molten lava). His most recent creation is the Apollo, a pepper created by cross-breeding Pepper X with the Carolina Reaper, which, once again, is so new it's only found in another Last Dab sauce.
• The Jamaicans are head-over-heels for Scotch Bonnet peppers, a type of habanero pepper, which can be found in the majority of non-dessert foods there. Most notable is the pretty innocent-sounding Mannish Water (for certain values of "innocent"), a goat soup severely spiced up by tossing a bunch of Scotch Bonnets into the pot. Jamaica's jerk spice used on all kinds of meats is also typically based on a mix of Scotch Bonnets, allspice (Jamaica's other most favourite spice), and sugar.
• Legend says that Nashville's famous Hot Chicken was originally devised as revenge against a man caught adultering to make him suffer—that is, it was originally cooked to be a painful experience, not an enjoyable one. He wound up liking it instead. The original recipe, still used today all over Nashville (and other locations where it's become popular, like Los Angeles and Beijing), is literally 75% ground chili peppers. Initially it was cayenne, which gives Hot Chicken its characteristic burnt red look, but hotter peppers have been used since. The ratio is sometimes lowered for people who prefer milder levels, but it never goes above 75% as that's when its flavor starts to diminish.
• Resiniferatoxin and tinyatoxin are chemical analogues of capsaicin, produced by Euphorbia succulent plants, that are hundreds of times more potent. Attempts to translate the level of spiciness of the pure compounds into Scoville units give results in the several billion range, and the compounds have been investigated as therapeutic neurotoxins in very small doses (like botox). Liquid latex made by cutting into Euphorbia plants is used as a pesticide and animal repellent, but has sometimes been consumed by humans - to cause vomiting, rather than something anyone would enjoy eating.
• Somewhat similarly to the Euphorbia thing, some actual capsicum cultivars were actually bred with ludicrously high capsaicin content as animal repellent—specifically as elephant repellent. (Elephants hate capsaicin and chilis and anything that smells like them.) Most notably, the "ghost pepper" strains arising from northeastern India were primarily bred so the fruits could be ground up and smeared on fences to keep crop-eating elephants away; it was only much more recently that anyone ever considered eating them.
• Blue Diamond Almonds released a line of flavors in 2021 called "Almonds Extreme," with a seasoning mix made from cayenne peppers at the bottom of the spiciness scale. That's because the other variants use habanero peppers, ghost peppers, and Carolina Reaper peppers.
• Paqui already invokes this trope with their hotter flavors (one would have to be crazy or a true pepper head to casually munch on a pack of ghost pepper chips), but where they really up the ante is with their One Chip Challenge. One chip, flavored with Scorpion Peppers and Carolina Reaper Peppers, which comes individually wrapped in a coffin-shaped box with loud, brightly advertised disclaimers on it, which also includes nitrile gloves to handle the thing with. The company challenges people, including celebrities, to share their attempts at keeping it down without relief on social media each year, and most people fail to do so for more than a minute.
  
  Unfortunately, the warnings against minors and people with any issue affecting their ability to handle spice taking the challenge went increasingly unheeded due to the challenge's popularity on social media. Paqui ultimately ended up having to withdraw the product from sale in 2023 when a 14-year-old died mere hours after eating an One Chip.
• Spiking food with hot sauce is a common tactic to punish lunch thieves in an office or other communal space. This is a Reddit story about someone who spiked a sandwich with Carolina Reaper sauce to catch a thief, but got in trouble when the culprit turned out to be a janitor's child and his mother got angry.

Allyl isothiocyanate (Horseradish, Wasabi, Mustard)

• It should be noted that, like with capsaicin, allyl isothiocyanate at extremely high concentrations (such as in essential oil of mustard) can be toxic, not to mention it's notorious as a contact irritant. So, everything in moderation.
• On the subject of toxicity, while the difference between a hot sauce and a pepper spray is merely capsaicin concentration and packaging, the name of the infamous "mustard gas" is doubly misleading. It's a liquid rather than gas, it's chemically unrelated to allyl isothiocyanate, and it's orders of magnitude more toxic. It is said to smell like mustard, but using it as a condiment is a bad idea.
• Wasabi, a Japanese plant in the same family as horseradish (and cabbage!), is another notable variant. A Japanese team won the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize^note a parody of the Nobel Prizes for chemistry for patenting a fire alarm for the deaf that sprays out aerosolized wasabi. The smell of wasabi can wake up sleepers in under 10 seconds. While clever, such an invention is sadly kneecapped by wasabi's notoriously short shelf life.
  • Unlike capsaicin-based heat, the effect of wasabi doesn't last very long. Indeed, much of its popularity originates in the fact that it can produce quite a strong heat, which then goes away quickly and doesn't obstruct or distort its consumer's sense of taste for the rest of the meal.
• Horseradish, western cousin of wasabi (and not an instrument). Especially one sauce used in Ukraine - it is mixed with Russian Mustard, which is damn hot already, and an extra helping of salt. It does taste good with borscht, if you apply it in a thin layer on bread. Because wasabi has such a short shelf life, many places will use colored horseradish as an imitation wasabi.
• Mustards usually don't go as hot as pepper-based sauces, but Russian mustard takes the cake. Even in small quantities it's a fine (but not nice) cure for snuffle. It is because Russian mustard is a) made with brown (AKA Indian) mustard seed, which is more potent, and b) because it is traditionally brewed with boiling water, which extracts much more of the active compound. A half-teaspoon of a good Russian mustard will make your eyes pop out.
• To unsuspecting continentals, especially Germans and Frenchmen with their lighter and sweeter blends, English mustard^note which has a higher concentration of mustard seed can do this. Americans raised on tepid yellow mustard are also susceptible. Those that aren't warned off by the vivid yellow color tend to sorely regret applying the same quantities of English mustard as they would of their native blends.
  • The hottest English mustard is probably Tewkesbury mustard, which traditionally consists of finely-ground mustard mixed with grated horseradish, then formed into balls and air-dried to preserve it. Once the balls are dry, bits are broken off and mixed with a liquid (water, vinegar, wine, beer, and cider all have their partisans) and sometimes other ingredients (honey is traditional), to make a thick paste, used as a condiment. Modern preparations tend to skip the balls and air-drying, but it's still a thick, nose-opening, eye-watering paste. (The typical thickness of the paste is the reason for the English idiom "thick as Tewkesbury mustard" for "extraordinarily stupid". The saying, by the by, is very old; Shakespeare has Falstaff say it about Ned Poins in Henry IV, Part 2.)
  • England also gives us the original Wow-Wow Sauce, the stuff that Terry Pratchett inadvertently made famous when he parodied it in Discworld. Also known as "Bow-Wow Sauce", it's made by taking a base of flour, butter and beef stock before mixing in English mustard, mushroom ketchup, wine vinegar, port, parsley, and either pickled cucumbers or pickled walnuts.
• Estonian mustard, especially Põltsamaa brand. It is even stronger than the Russian mustards, which are strong enough.

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