Hottest Wings
I used to own a wing joint. Nothing fancy, but a good selection of wing flavors and pints. Inevitably we would have people come in and order the suicide wings (I like super spicy foods, so these were pretty hot). Of those people, about 5-10% would always start the joke/sarcastic conversation “These aren’t that hot. Can’t you do better?!?” Yuk, yuk, yuk.
One of my best regulars, a dentist who fancied himself a gardener, decided to help us out and planted a ghost pepper bush (at the time the hottest pepper in the world) and he could bring us the bounty of his harvest. And he would intentionally under water the bush so the peppers would be as hot as they could be. When he would bring us the peppers, I would grind them (seeds and all) into a nice paste, which I would combine with our sauce and keep to the side for when our spicy wing connoisseurs would show up and complain about the sauce not being hot enough.
I would only serve them one wing. I would make them wear gloves to eat it to prevent capsaicin burns on their skin. I would specifically tell them about the heat they were about to get into, trying to dissuade them from eating this culinary monstrosity. By the time we got through all this, every single man always now viewed this as an insult to their manhood and could not be stopped from eating this wing.
So they did…The fun thing about capsaicin oil is it can often take a few seconds to kick in. Usually just enough time for the person to scarf down the wing and start to smugly tell us how it wasn’t that hot…And then the heat would begin. And once it started it was relentless. The wing was free, but the cup of milk after was $20. I never had a single person ask for a second one.
By the way, I never had a woman complain about the heat, and they would sometimes actually ask if there was another level they could try.