The hot dog on my plate frightened me. But as I sat at Gator Dawgs on West University Avenue armed with a half gallon of milk, a loaf of bread and a box of Kleenex, I knew it was too late to back out. I was about to eat a Ghost Chili Dawg, topped with sauce from the bhut jolokia, known as the ghost pepper, the hottest in the world.
“Dammit,” I thought. “I should have passed the story off on someone else.” It wasn’t the first, or even the fifth time I’d had that thought. I was sorry a week prior, about three seconds after I told Avenue editor Jon Silman that I wanted to eat a ghost chili pepper and write about it.
As with my childhood dreams of winning an Olympic gold medal or becoming an astronaut, the glory of the achievement had overshadowed my realization that it would be a giant pain in the ass.
Spicy heat is measured in Scoville units, determined by the level of the nerve-stinging compound capsaicin in food. A particularly hot jalapeno is about 10,000 Scovilles. Ghost peppers can be 100 times hotter, at about 1 million. Once I started research for the article, my regret turned to flat-out fear. I watched one YouTube video after another of people eating the pepper. Some vomited. Others curled on the floor in agony. Wikipedia told me the pepper is grown in India, where police use it in smoke bombs and hand grenades. It’s great for controlling riots and flushing terrorists from their hideouts.
I read that the more spice you eat the more your body can tolerate, so I began to put Tabasco on everything. Rice and Tabasco. Toast and Tabasco. Avocado-and-cream-cheese sushi and Tabasco.
A woman in India earned a place in the Guinness World Records by eating 51 ghost peppers in two minutes. Afterward, she smeared handfuls of the seeds in her eyes.
Candy Britt, who owns Gator Dawgs with her husband Otis, said she ordered the pepper from New York after she saw it on the television show “Man v. Food.”
“My son really likes spicy food, and he wanted to try it,” she said. The Britt’s daughter, 9-year-old Gabrielle, said the ghost chili sauce, which includes olive oil and butter, was “freakin’ hot.”
Otis said he considered asking customers to sign a waiver before eating the pepper. Instead, he wrote on his price board that the item is “XXXXtra hot.”
Desperate for a pepper-eating partner, I asked Otis to eat with me. “Hell no,” he laughed. Instead, his 18-year-old son Keary and Alligator writer Andrew Pantazi volunteered. With the Alligator staff laughing in the background, the three of us ate our hot dogs in silence. It took me seven glasses of milk, one slice of Wonder Bread and 18 extra-soft Kleenex to get through half a hot dog. My eyes watered, my ears popped and my stomach ached. But nobody vomited or had a seizure. Now, a day later, my only symptom is the gas.
