Karen picked up some of the fabled New Mexican Hatch chiles for me. I have barely ever heard of them but I like being, you know, on the cutting edge of things. Plus I like peppers even hot peppers (thank you mom), so, I thought what the hey let’s give em a try. The internet tells me they have a Scoville unit scale rating of 0 to 70,000. Seems fair. Not that I really know what that means but since it’s a pretty broad spectrum of heat chances are that these would fall midway on the scale and that wouldn’t be too bad. I mean, I can take it.
I roasted, peeled and tasted a bit of one (there were 4) and then I ran around the kitchen screaming “Help! Help! Help!” But in a pretty masculine way. Then I, as one does, tasted the other 3. I figured that with such a huge range I’d be lucky and actually be able to taste one of these storied peppers. So about 20 minutes later when I was able to stop sobbing and catch my breath, this time not as masculinely as I would have liked (thankfully no one was watching me), I wiped a tear off my eye and realized that a scoville unit scale rating of 70,000 is not as eye-friendly as one might assume. I couldn’t actually form words or even see at that point but I did have some rather ungentlemanly thoughts.
I haven’t really recovered as yet but I did manage to tuck these babies into a lunch that I plan to give to Karen sometime soon.
