This is an addition to my review of this meal by N.

I love spicy food. I’m the guy at the Chinese restaurant that orders the food to be extra extra spicy and then asks for hot chili oil on the side, in order to dump in extra spice. So I really enjoyed the extra spicy meal.

That said, this meal had 2 habanero peppers. For those non hot pepper people, peppers are rated for how spicy they are on the scoville scale. A habanero chili has a scoville heat rating of 100,000 – 350,000 while a jalapeno has a scoville heat rating of 2,500 – 8,000. To put that in perspective the hottest habanero is 140 times hotter than the mildest jalapeno. Even the most mild habanero is still almost 13 times hotter than the hottest jalapeno.  Being familiar with the habanero, I knew to wear plastic gloves while handling it and that I had to remove the seeds and ribs from the pepper or the dish would be too hot even for me. The fact that those directions are missing for the instructions is crazy.

If I were writing the instructions for the meal I would also have made a point of saying how hot the pepper is and maybe to just add a quarter of the pepper if you want spicy but not too spicy.

Next, I would certainly put a note on the order page that this meal is super spicy.

Finally as I mentioned I really enjoyed how spicy this meal was, that said there were so many other great flavors between the eggplant, garlic, ginger and mint and a lot of those tastes do not come through over the heat of the habanero.

 

Grade: B