Devise Outside the Lines: Pain, Patience, & Peppers

A few years ago, I started growing peppers for one simple reason: I love hot sauce.

I’m not totally sure where the obsession started, but there’s a decent chance my dad deserves some of the credit. When I was a kid, he’d feed me hot peppers just to watch me suffer. He thought it was hilarious to see me sweating, red-faced, and trying to pretend I was fine.

Then, somewhere along the way, that trauma turned into this weird little obsession involving grow lights, tiny seedlings, homegrown tomatoes, jalapeños, Carolina Reapers, countless hot sauce recipes, and more than one extremely painful mistake.

The Carolina Reaper is what really got me hooked.

People talk about Reapers almost entirely in terms of heat — which is fair, because they’re f*cking insanely hot — but what surprised me is how much flavor is actually underneath all of that pain. They’re fruity, bright, almost sweet.

To put “f*cking insane” into slightly more scientific terms, pepper heat is measured in Scoville Heat Units, or SHU. The scale goes back to 1912, when an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville came up with a test that basically involved diluting pepper extract in sugar water until a panel of human tasters could no longer detect the heat. Which is an objectively hilarious way to do science, but it gave us a language for comparing just how badly different peppers want to hurt us.

For some perspective, the jalapeño, the pepper most people think of when they think “hot”, usually lands somewhere around 2,500–8,000 Scoville units. A Carolina Reaper averages about 1.64 million. Depending on the jalapeño you’re comparing it to, that makes a Reaper roughly 200 to 650 times hotter.

And somehow, it’s still incredibly delicious. When you taste that fruitiness up front, for a moment you can almost convince yourself everything is going to be fine.

Then, as my friend Kent puts it, “you gotta pay the tax man.” And the tax man always shows up.

That’s kind of what I love about hot sauce in general. At a certain level of heat, eating it stops feeling like eating and starts feeling like you’re on a drug trip. Your face gets hot. Your ears start buzzing. Your scalp starts sweating. Your nose is running. There’s this strange little wave of panic where your brain is very clearly telling you, Hey man, I think we made a huge mistake.

Meanwhile another part of your brain is going, This is f*cking awesome. 

For a few minutes, there’s nothing else going on in the world. You’re not thinking about work. You’re not checking your phone. You’re not thinking about what you need to do tomorrow. You’re completely, involuntarily present … and suffering.

And then, for reasons I still can’t completely explain, you go back for another bite. I think there’s something in that.

A lot of the best things in life come with a cost. Great food takes time. Getting good at something usually means sucking at it first. The experiences you remember are rarely the ones where everything was easy and comfortable. Sometimes the price of incredible flavor is sweating through your shirt at the dinner table.

The funny part is that making great hot sauces and sirachas requires the one virtue I absolutely lack — patience. It is slow.

You start the peppers indoors as tiny seedlings, months before you’ll get anything useful out of them. Then you transplant them, water them, move them around, obsess over them a little too much, and wait. Then come the flowers. Then the peppers. Then the long, mildly infuriating wait for them to finally ripen. Then wait some more. And hope they’ll be perfect.

A lot of what I know about that process I owe to my partner, Joanna, who’s been instrumental in teaching me how to garden without immediately killing everything I touch.

Gardening and cooking has been a maddening form of therapy for me. You can’t rush a pepper plant. Believe me, I’ve tried. That forced slowdown has actually become one of my favorite parts of the whole thing. There’s something incredibly satisfying about eventually cooking with a pepper you remember as a tiny green sprout sitting under a light in your house.

Once the peppers are finally ready, though, the creative part takes over. 

So far this year I’ve made four different hot sauce recipes in really small batches. Partly because I’m experimenting and searching for the perfect combination, and partly because wasting an entire harvest on a sauce that misses the mark would be heartbreaking.

Each batch has been different. Some have leaned sweeter and fruitier. Some brighter and more acidic. Some were designed around flavor first, others around heat.

And I’ve definitely screwed some of them up.

One batch that was supposed to be brutally hot came out almost embarrassingly mild. Good sauce, but when you’re using Carolina Reapers and the end result barely makes you sweat, it feels like you’ve missed the assignment.

So the very next recipe I ratcheted things up a few hundred notches using a Reaper, a scorpion pepper, a habanero and a Bhut Jolokia (aka Ghost). Heat problem solved.

I’ve also learned some lessons that had absolutely nothing to do with recipe development.

Like: wear surgical gloves when handling superhot peppers. Even if you think you’ve washed your hands thoroughly, trust me, you haven’t—and can’t. I learned that hard lesson after cutting peppers barehanded and later using the bathroom. There are certain mistakes in life where the lesson really sticks.

Within minutes, I found myself standing in the shower in absolute agony, pouring half-and-half on my (you know what) because dairy was the only thing I could think of that might neutralize the capsaicin. It is difficult to maintain your dignity while naked in a shower holding a carton of half-and-half.

On the plus side, I have not forgotten to wear gloves since.

That’s basically the whole process in miniature: experiment, screw something up, learn, adjust, try again. And that’s probably why I enjoy it so much.

Hot sauce is ridiculously open-ended. Change the tomatoes and the sauce changes. Use a different pepper and it changes. Add fruit, garlic, basil, more vinegar, less vinegar, more heat, less heat—suddenly you’ve made something completely different.

Even when I follow the same recipe, weighing each ingredient down to the gram, the result isn’t exactly the same because the ingredients themselves aren’t exactly the same. One pepper might be manageable. The next one might make you think you’re licking the brain of God. There’s something cool about that unpredictability.

At its core, this whole thing is really just another creative outlet. You take a bunch of things you grew yourself, throw ideas at them, taste the result and decide what you’d do differently next time.

And after countless sauces and failed attempts, I don’t really feel like I’ve figured it out. Mostly I just have more ideas.

Which is probably the point.

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Devise Outside the Lines is a series exploring what Devise team members get up to outside of work hours, from creative passion projects to travel and adventures.