A neighbor gave me some hot peppers and I put one (chopped into tiny pieces) in my food and it’s too hot and spicy for me. I suspect this is a ghost pepper. What can I do to reduce the spiciness so I can eat this pot of food?
Please help me! I just ate a few bites and I’m sweating nonstop because of the spiciness and my lips are on fire!!
Thank you !
PS. I like to garden, and I swap our harvest with our neighbors.
by Mystic2288
31 Comments
Best thing to do is to dehydrate them and grind them. Then you can mix some up with salt and anything else you’d like in there (i.e. garlic and onion powder etc.) to make your own spicy seasonings. Just add the powder little by little to the seasonings until it achieves your desired spice level!
I don’t think there’s much you can do besides make 5 times more of whatever it is and mix it all together, it could still be too hot to eat if you do that though
Not a ghost, some sort of primo, a step above ghost. The cap oil burns off quickly so if you put some in food, just let it simmer longer and it’ll chill out
Capsaicin denatures in alcohol and vinegar a bit. You can try to make.some vinegar based hot sauce
A whole superhot? No wonder it’s too hot!
I have a decent heat tolerance and use up to one scotch bonnet in my meals.
Lots of carrots if making hot sauce, and some sweated onions.. celery, sweet potato, fruits etc…. or powder it and mix with other seasonings… I prefer sauce but love th powder for pizza and pasta …
The only real way is to add more food. My go to when I make something that is just too spicy is to keep it in a jar and add it to a different meal, usually a curry or stir fry. Unfortunately, depending on your spice tolerance this may have the effect of ruining yet another meal before you get it locked in.
Instead of chopping and adding to food, make a lactofermented sauce. It’ll still be spicy as fuck, but you can just use less sauce.
Eat more if them so it’s less spicy
Have some yogurt or a yogurt sauce with it. Have a pitcher of cold water ready too. I find that chili heat is reduced to basically nothing when it has been cooked food an hour or two in a slow cooker. Most of the heat it in the seeds and the white inner bits of chilies btw.
(wo)man up
What
What’s the dish? Hard to know how to help without knowing what it is. Usually adding something like milk or some kind of dairy will help reduce it. But… It depends on your spice tolerance 😅 and how much you need to adjust it.
Eat more of it to build your tolerance.
I’m not saying that’s the best idea. But it’s one that works
Make a fermented hot sauce with them …
The only way to reduce the spiciness is to make more food and add the spicy food to the new food
Put a LOT more of everything else into the meal. and add dairy if it makes sense.
Dilute the ratio of ghost pepper as much as possible.
and the stop using ghost peppers.
It’s like Snoop says, “no stems, no seeds”.
But yeah take the stems and seeds out along with the pith, then run them through a food mill.
Pretty much dilution is the only way. Marinating/pickling reduces heat a little, or just making a dish with vinegar. Seems unlikely you could eat them all (I doubt I could before they go bad) so you could freeze some (just put them in a ziploc or jar) or dry them out and have peppers for the next year.
jealous btw, I live in a weird climate and am still waiting for my scorps and reapers to come in… I grew several plants and have gotten exactly 2 so far.
Ferment with other non-spicy things mixed in then make sauce
Sugar. Idk why this isn’t mentioned more, but any sugars will usually work. Sweet fruit, vegetables, tomatoes, honey, etc.
I would put disposable gloves on, then them open, remove all ribs and seed, and then put them in a fermentation vessel with a “heavy” salt water brine and let them naturally lactoferment.
Plenty of resources around the best ways to do this.
In my experience it dulls the spice level a bit. Furthermore, if you want to further reduce the spice level, ferment some sweet bell pepper with these and blend the whole lot together after fermentation, cut with fermentation brine and preferred vinegar. Keeps really well in the fridge nearly indefinitely stored properly.
Omg save me some 😍
Soak them in milk or vinegar. No seeds.
citrus: lemon or lime juice added to the already-made meal. this would also add flavor so experiment with whatever you are making. i’m surprised i haven’t seen this one mentioned yet, it’s one of the reasons you get limes/lemons as a garnish with a lot of spicy dishes in many cuisines.
vinegar would do the same thing, white vinegar would probably be best added while cooking but you could probably use a flavored vinegar on top of all already made dish. malted vinegar, apple cider vinegar, rice vinegar, etc.
yogurt has been said but it’s also a great option.
Depending on what you made, you could try dumping a bunch of cream cheese in it. I find that helps to mellow stuff out a bit, although you used an extremely hot pepper in your food, so I’m not sure how much the cream cheese would help.
Eat, cup of milk, repeat
This is a Carolina reaper, not a ghost pepper (which is great because ghost peppers taste like bandaids). You can do a couple of things: scrape out the pith and seeds, which contain the majority of the capsaicinoids. You can also bake them for an extended period of time: heat breaks down capsaicin over time. That said, these are hot as SHIT and will still be that way after you do a lot of work to them!
Can you let it get old? I find that old jalapeños are way less spicy than fresh ones. Not sure if that’s true for them all.
One of those is probably sufficient to kick up an entire stock pot of chili. It’d be a shame to waste those, because they’re really, really tasty. But if you can’t take the heat, there isn’t much you can do but dilute. You can try bumping acidity, and cooking with heat can break down capsaicin to an extent, but really it’s going to come down to dose per batch for superhots. I’d be canning those so I could use them sparingly as needed.
Sugar