So, you got a little overconfident and went with extra-hot buffalo sauce for your wings, added too many jalapenos to your nachos or were way too generous with the cayenne pepper while cooking dinner. Or maybe you just had no idea those peanuts were even going to be spicy.
Whether on purpose or not, we've probably all bit off more than we could chew, at least a time or two, when it comes to spicy foods. So is there anything you can do to help cool down your mouth after eating spicy food? Or was your fate sealed with that first bite? As it turns out, soothing that fire in your mouth starts with understanding the science behind the burn — since it can help you understand what to reach for and what to avoid as soon as that burn hits.
You already know that when your mouth is on fire, it's not really on fire. It just feels like it is. But why? While the two may seem unrelated, the burning sensation you feel when eating something spicy is similar to the burning pain you experience when you accidentally touch a hot pan. In response to each, temperature-sensitive pain receptors are triggered — immediately screaming, "This is HOT! Sensing your skin or mouth is in danger, your brain sends back sensations of pain, hoping to encourage you to stop doing whatever it is you're doing.
In the case of the hot pan, this pain serves an important purpose — it triggers an immediate reflex to remove your hand before it burns. The black pepper and Sichuan pepper, depsite also being called pepper, do not belong to the Capsicums. Since spiciness is very subjective and everyone perceives it differently, it is challenging to measure spiciness using human tasters as you do for sweetness.
Also, people can only test so many spicy samples at the time. Nevertheless, using human testers is still a commonly used method. The Scoville unit scale uses human testers to determine and compare spiciness. This scale, developed back in , uses tasters to determine how spicy a pepper or mixture of peppers is.
Tasters get a series of dilutions of a specific pepper. At a certain point, the pepper is so diluted that the tasted can no longer perceive it. The number of dilutions required is the measure for spiciness. By comparing the results of different peppers for the same person, you get a decent comparison. The spiciest peppers known have scores of over a million in Scoville Units. For perspective, a mild banana pepper has a score of ,, a Jalapeno pepper is 2,, whereas Tabasco pepper is 25,, Commercial pepper spray has a score of over 1 million units.
Nowadays, tasters are no longer need to test for the spiciness of a food. A more objective method has been developed since using high performance liquid chromatography. Chromatography is a widely used analytical method to quantify the presence of all sorts of molecules. In the case of spiciness you can use it to measure the concentration of all capsaicinoids in a food. This method has allowed researchers to compare the heat of a wide variety of peppers quite efficiently.
Since pepper suppliers and manufacturers still commonly talk about spiciness on the Scoville unit scale, the results of HPLC are often used to calculate a Scoville value.
The difference in spiciness is considerable between different varieties. Interestingly though, even within a variety of pepper types, the degree of spiciness can vary considerably. From personal experience I can tell that Jalapeno peppers, even from the same plant, can vary considerably in their heat. For other peppers, the growing conditions can impact the spiciness of the pepper.
A possible factor of influence is the amount of water or salt a plant received during its flowering stage. Also the amount of salt in which the pepper plant is grown can be of influence. When eaten, capsaicin binds to receptors on your tongue that detect extreme temperature and pain.
These receptors then carry a message to your brain saying that a. Your tongue feels like it's on fire, because your brain actually thinks it's on fire. At this point you're probably thinking, "Great. Self-inflicted tongue burns all around! But why is this not a one-time thing? Why do we voluntarily do this to ourselves, time and time again?
Once you start feeling that intense heat and subsequent pain, your brain then responds by releasing endorphins, which help block the pain, and dopamine, which triggers a sense of euphoria similar to that feeling of "runner's high. Essentially, we're addicted to the spicy high. But don't get me wrong, I'm not only about the high. After all, a chili pepper at room temperature will still "burn" our tongue and cause us to sweat. We'll crave ice-cold water and wave our hands frantically in front of our face.
To answer this question, we need to investigate the physiology of taste. It turns out that capsaicin - the active ingredient in spicy food - binds to a special class of vanilloid receptor inside our mouth called VR1 receptors. After capsaicin binds to these receptors, the sensory neuron is depolarized, and it sends along a signal indicating the presence of spicy stimuli. But here's the strange part: VR1 receptors weren't designed to detect capsaicin.
They bind spicy food by accident.
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