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    Sweet Heat
    Sweet Heat
    Sweet Heat
    Ebook125 pages2 hours

    Sweet Heat

    By Dave Dewitt

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Since the ancient Mayas, sweet tastes and chiles have put their pleasure into a single palate-pleasing package. Now here's a guide to the most delicious ways you can yield to those same irresistible desires.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTerra Nova Books
    Release dateDec 15, 2018
    ISBN9781948749398
    Sweet Heat
    Author

    Dave Dewitt

    Dave DeWitt is a food historian and one of the foremost authorities in the world on chile peppers, spices, and spicy foods. He has published fifty-six books, including Chile Peppers: A Global History (UNM Press). He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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      Book preview

      Sweet Heat - Dave Dewitt

      Author

      INTRODUCTION

      The Nine Cravings for Chile Chocolate

      To understand why people like to spice up their sweet stuff, we need to look at why they crave certain foods. My example for this is chile-infused chocolate in all its forms, a combination that goes back to the Mayas, who served it in two forms: as a hot, bitter drink, and sweetened with honey, the original sweetener before the technology to produce sugar from cane was invented.

      There are three basic reasons we crave sugar. Stress can cause fatigue, but sugar can send waves of energy through the body, and we crave that energy. Diet is the second reason; if you’ve been following a low-carb or low-fat diet, your body can become resistant to insulin, sending signals to your brain to eat more sweets even though there is plenty of sugar in your blood. And the genetic makeup of your body can be responsible, too. If you have a gene called glucose transporter type 2, it triggers the craving for sweets, and there’s nothing you can do except resist it if you can.

      There are also three things that trigger a craving for chocolate. First is the most obvious, flavor. Chocolate is quite delicious, with excellent mouth-feel, and most people want to repeat the chocolate experience again and again. The second trigger for the craving is the pleasure chocolate gives you. It stimulates serotonin release, which can decrease anxiety and depression. In addition, caffeine and theobromine, both found in chocolate, can give the body a much-needed boost of energy, and anadamine, another substance found in chocolate, may duplicate the effects of marijuana, giving a little high to the person consuming it.

      These six craving triggers are boosted by three more triggers when chiles are mixed with sweetened chocolate. First, if chiles make totally bland foods flavorful, their addition to something delicious like chocolate strengthens the pleasure that chocolate provides, particularly for chileheads. Chiles are also unique, and add a dimension to foods that no other spice provides. And chile lovers expect their food to be spicy, so they crave chiles when it’s not.

      So chiles increase the cravings for sweet things in general and chocolate in particular. So all we need do to make chile chocolate even more desirable is to simply add one additional ingredient, as we see in our first recipe.

      THE GREAT MONTEZUMA HOT CHOCOLATE DRINK

      My friend Richard Sterling developed this recipe, which is his version of how the Spaniards transformed Montezuma’s favorite spicy beverage with the addition of alcohol. He commented: Salud! Drink to the Old World and the New.

      12 ounces prepared hot chocolate (not too sweet)

      2 tablespoons honey

      1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

      2 jiggers chile pepper vodka, such as Absolut Peppar or Stolichnaya Pertsovka

      2 tablespoons heavy cream

      Cayenne powder and cinnamon sticks for garnish or Grated chocolate and dried red chiles for garnish

      Combine the chocolate, honey, vanilla, and vodka in a small pitcher. Pour into two long-stemmed glasses or Irish coffee glasses. Float the cream on top of the two drinks. Dust with a pinch of cayenne pepper, and garnish with cinnamon sticks—or dust with grated chocolate, and garnish with dried red chiles cut lengthwise and fixed to the edges of the glasses.

      Yield: 2 servings Heat scale: Mild

      Candy is quite a simple treat, composed of a concentrated solution of sugar in water, plus flavorings and colorants. The earliest, pre-sugar candies, were honey-coated fruits and flowers, which preserved them for later enjoyment in the form of candy. Their first use in the homes of the wealthy was medicinal—they cooled a sore throat and were believed to aid digestion. The first sugar candies were simple as well, just crystallized sugar called rock candy—again a delight of the wealthy because of the high cost of imported sugar in the early days. In the mid-1800s, technological advances like the candy press and the revolving steam pan revolutionized candy manufacturing because they cut the human workload and also made possible the production of multiple shapes and sizes of candy at the same time. Now, anyone can be a professional candy maker.

      Commercially, there are three groups of candies. The first has 100 percent sugar, or close to it, and they are known as hard candy or creams. The second group has about 95 percent sugar, and examples are marshmallows or nougats. The final group reduces the sugar content to 75 percent, and these are the truffles, fudges, and caramels.

      I have simplified the candy-making process, so the only really specialized equipment you will need are a scale and a candy thermometer. The only complicated recipe here is Candied Capsicums, where, with help from my good friend Harald Zoschke in Germany, I return to the ancient concept of coating fruits, but this time, the fruits are chile pods, and the sweetness is not from honey but rather a simple sugar syrup. Because all the water in the pods (90 percent by weight) must be replaced by sugar, it is a lengthy process, but the results are worth it.

      CHILE-SHAPED PIÑON-CHILE CHOCOLATE TRUFFLES

      New Mexican red chile is again the heat source in this tremendous treat. With the combination of baking chocolate and white chocolate, a good blending of

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