Hot Ones Home Game

There's a YouTube interview show that Sallie, a bunch of my friends, and I love. It's called Hot Ones. Basically, celebrities get interviewed over 20 or so minutes, while eating 10 wings, eat getting hotter than the last.

Some of the them (Vanessa Hutchins) are complete wimps and just sort of lick the wing. Some of them (Nick Offerman) barely bat an eye at the heat. It's a study of the human spirit really. Can you keep answering mundane questions about your celebrity life while your throat is on fire.

Well, I really like hot sauces. I like spicy foods. So we decided to do the dumb thing and do the home version of our favorite YouTube show.  I spent about $70 on official Hot Ones hot sauces and now my fridge is filled with little glass bottles of delicious.

I imagine the host Sean Evans, sitting at my dinning room table, "Welcome to Hot Ones, the show with hot questions and even hotter wings. Today's guest is Dan Story and his idiot friends. They're known for doing dumb things together in their free time. They've prepared roughly 30 chicken wings and 20 vegetarian wings and they are about to ruin their weekend."

A Scoville unit his how you measure spiciness. It's a scale based on the concentration of capsaicin, the active spicy ingredient in peppers.

To give you a baseline, Taco Bell Fire Sauce is about 500 Scovilles. Cholula, one of the preferred hot sauces of Chipotle and diners everywhere, is about 3600 Scovilles.

OK, now that we've established a normal person scale, let's talk about all the mistakes I made!

First up, was Howler Monkey (600 Scovilles) - Tastes like Cholula but smokier. Nothing special about this one, don't think I would buy it again.

Pineapple Habenero (12,200 Scovilles) - This was the first big leap in hotness, but you really don't taste the hot. The pineapple sweetens it up. This tastes great on tacos with a sweeter salsa. This was one of my top 3.

Cheeba Gold (25,300 Scovilles) - This was a surprising taste, more like a curry than a hot sauce. I'd put this on naan or chicken Tikka Masala, not eggs or tacos or traditional hot cause transportation devices.

Torch Bearer (52,000 Scovilles) - Remember a few weeks ago when I told you about that chip that was so hot it made me feel like I was giving birth to a demon? Yeah, well that's the first ingredient in this sauce. The second is garlic. It ... was... delicious. I've mixed it with Dijon mustard and put it on a grilled cheese. I put it in a Bloody Mary. Just fantastic, one of my favorites out of the bunch.

Trader Joes (80,000 Scovilles) - This was a late addition to our lineup and I had trouble trying to find out how hot it actually was to fit it in to the lineup in the right order. I found a few forum posts that put it around 80,000 Scovilles, but this thing burned. It was a fast burn, like a room filled with gas, igniting quickly but burning itself out. It didn't prepare us for what came next.

Firewater (112,000 Scoville) - Hooo mama. This one sent us on a very long (15 minute) break between wings. Sal's face started melting, David couldn't talk, Jessica turned really red. It honestly made the rest of these hot causes look tame in comparison.

Mauna Kea Magma (500,000 Scoville) - This was an interseting one. On the scale it should've murdered us, but it had coffee mixed into it. Something about the bitterness of the coffee cut down on the heat. It was an interesting hot sauce. One that I wouldn't mind mixing with ranch or something, but nothing that blew my socks off.

Exhorresco (625,000 Scoville) - There were no taste buds left at this point. Our bodies were in shock. We had all the windows on the main floor open even though it was only 45 degrees out. The adrenaline was flowing and I was feeling invincible. This hot sauce was delicious. I would like to do a scientific study and start with this one next time to see if I love it as much.

Last Dab Redux (2+ million) - This is the big bad mama. Delicious to put like one dab in a Bloody Mary, but god help you if more than one dab comes out. It's so thick, we honestly had a hard time getting it to stick to the chicken wings, but I've had this on tacos before. It makes you take a deep breath between bites and reflect on your life decisions. Somehow though, it still has a flavor. That's the biggest thing about all these hotsauces.

There weren't just hot, they all brought something to the table from flavortown.

Sallie Started the Fire

Many people say my lovely wife is quite the fireball. Strong personality, fiery red hair, and opinions that can't be swayed.

A lot of people don't know how much of a fireball my wife truly is, in that, she loves to almost burn out house down... so so many times

College didn't offer too many opportunities for me to see her penchant for a life dedicated to the flame. We honestly didn't cook much, and when we did it was usually pasta. It's kinda hard to start a fire when you're applying heat by boiling water. (But just you wait)

They don't prepare you for an arson leaning spouse in all the pre-marriage workbooks. It never came up as a topic I should've covered. "Hey Sal, page 13 here says I should ask you how you are with kitchens and fires?" "Oh, yeah that, it's not a good situation. Make sure there's a fire extinguisher in any kitchen we ever share."

I didn't even get this preview when we lived in Myrtle Beach because she worked the night shift. I was always the cook.

The first time this happened was in our apartment on Juniata. She came downstairs to help me switch out the laundry, which was nice of her. We're having a relatively casual conversation, hang drying some items, talking about what we wanted to do with this wide open weekend.

I start the slog back up the stairs and see a sort of strobe affect happening against the wall. As I turned the corner, I see a six foot tall flame kissing the ceiling from our cheap Teflon WalMart pan.

See, what Sal had failed to tell me while she was helping me switch the laundry is that she started cooking her bacon with the assumption that she was have one delicious crispy side done by the time she got back upstairs. Well, she had two crispy sides, completely flame broiled.

I grabbed the pan, walked it outside, and just held the flaming metal and rubber until the fire ran it's course and I had to overly well done pieces of bacon laying in the middle.

There was another breakfast incident in our new house. This one wasn't as dramatic as the rest on the list and I don't even remember what the meal was. What I do remember is the charred remains in the pan when all was said and done.

If I let you down with that last one, let me tell you about the great soup fire. Yes, soup fire. Like a river catching fire in Cleveland, Sal caught soup broth on fire. (before the fire started, there was no liquid left.)

So let's rewind a bit, there had been a delicious soup broth, at a rolling boil, going for a solid 6 hours. An entire chicken carcass and a few fistfuls of vegetables and spices had filled the house with a delicious aroma.

We wanted to go to the gym though. Sal said, "we're good, there's a ton of liquid left in the pot."

Well, maybe there was at some point.

When we got home from the gym, after being gone for one house, we open the door and black smoke came billowing out. Every smoke alarm in the house was going off. The cats were standing at the door screaming at the top of their lungs.

Soup was off the menu that night unless we wanted charred bone soup. We had to pitch my pasta pot with the built in strainer lid, wash the curtains like 4 times, and get Steak N' Shake.

Two weeks ago, Sal and I met up for lunch time in the kitchen. She sheepishly said, "I accidentally caught our kitchen towel on fire."

To be fair, it was barely smoldering according to Sal, but ask yourself... how many towels have you caught on fire?

OK, so maybe my hubris got the best of me. This week, it was I that tried to burn the house down. I made myself a delicious grilled cheese with ham on the cast iron flat top. I only had 10 minutes between calls and I ran downstairs to make my next one... and I... Dan... left the burner on.

So Sal is still +3, but who's keeping score?