On 12/6/05, Winsor Crosby <wincros@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Common in Thai restaurants here. Delicious if within my tolerable
> heat range.
They're definitely at the hotter end of the scale. I did some looking
and one page listed them along with scotch bonnet peppers and habañero
in their "extremely hot" category.
I meant to mention that you also frequently get them with pho noodles
in Laos (there is a difference between Lao pho and Vietnamese pho).
You usually get a plate of vegetables with the bowl of noodles that
will include some lettuce, bean sprouts and green beans as well as
some chillies. You also will have a number sauces and powders to add.
Along with chilli powder you'd frequently see another type of chillie
which almost looked like a chilli jam, not sure how it's made but it
added a nice kick. I would usually add some of the jam and powdered
chillies to my pho as well as chilli sauce (which isn't very hot but
adds a nice flavour). Of course you also have to add fish sauce soy
sauce and a bit of sugar (you also usually get salt and msg as options
but I wouldn't add those). The bean sprouts should be put in just at
the end of the mixing so that they stay crunchy. Most people would eat
the green beans and lettuce seperately. Some places would also give
you a type of peanut paste which is tasty, sometimes I'd mix that into
the pho and sometimes I'd use it for dipping the veggies in. Good
places would make that reasonably hot too.
Sorry about the pho tangent. One of the things I'd see a lot though
would be Lao people taking the whole chillies and dipping them in
shrimp paste and eating them raw, I never did attempt that trick
(partly due to the heat of the chillies and partly due to the smell of
the shrimp paste).
Another nice condiment you'd frequently get would be a dish of fish
sauce with diced chillies in it. You could really control the heat
with that because the fish sauce itself picked up a good amount of
heat and if you wanted it hotter you could spoon out the chillies too.
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