Am I the only person who thinks our local chilli isn’t hot any longer?<\/p>\n
I don’t have a high tolerance for chilli. And for many years – even till when I started working, I found that chilli could make me cry.<\/p>\n
Yes, the ordinary chilli you buy from the wet market – it has no name, just chilli – and you pay like 20 cents for a few chillies. Now, you’d have to pay a dollar for the same amount.<\/p>\n
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This chilli you get today doesn’t look any different from chilli of the past, but I’ve found it doesn’t have any kick to it.<\/p>\n
My mother taught me that the hottest chillies are the skinny slim chillies.<\/p>\n
That’s a bit like people too ey? My fiercest teachers who scolded or smacked me were skinny too.<\/p>\n
And that theory is right, in a bunch of fat chillies, the skinny one is hotter.<\/p>\n
But, the skinny one of today is only as hot or slightly less hot than the fat one of yesteryear.<\/p>\n
Going by the fat-is-less-hot theory, when I watch shows on fat Mexican chillies and these ang mo<\/em> hosts who cry and bitch about how hot they are, I wonder how hot they truly are. Whether it is just these ang mos<\/em> who can’t hack it as chilli eaters, or whether they are truly very hot.<\/p>\n What’s the problem? Have they been GM-ing chillies and making them worse than before? Are weather patterns changing so much that our humble chilli has lost its punch? Have Malaysian farmers lost their knack for creating heat and spice in the chilli?<\/p>\n Last time, to go one up on the chilli, is to have chilli padi. It is so hot, that when you pluck it wrong, your fingers sting. And your eyes too, if, like me, you feel this inexplicable need to constantly rub your eyes when plucking chillies.<\/p>\n But have you noticed how hard it is to get a real chilli padi today?<\/p>\n When you ask for chilli padi, a lot of hawkers will give you these mid sized chillies. They’re not chillies, they’re not chilli padi. They’re not as big as normal chillies and they’re certainly not as small as the real chilli padi. They’re from Indonesia. But they are certainly hotter than the regular chilli.<\/p>\n My parents trained my sisters to eat chilli at a young age, feeding them with chilli padi. But they never bothered with me. So I sometimes get these pitying looks, like I’m missing something. And I tried my darnedest to keep up with the family when it came to chilli consumption. But I’d always lose in tears and a dripping nose.<\/p>\n I had ambitious thoughts – that one day, I could hold my head high and eat chilli with them on equal footing. And over the years, I thought, hey, I think I’m getting there, training myself to reach their standard.<\/p>\n But hell, the chilli isn’t as hot today as it was. I’m only fooling myself if I think I’m just as good as they are in eating chillies.<\/p>\n So from now on, no more normal sized chillies, I’m going down a size and moving up a notch on the hot scale.<\/p>\n By the way, isn’t this the same for the bitter gourd? It’s not as bitter as before. But I want it the way it was. Real bitter. The way my forefathers had to eat that ghastly vegetable. I want to eat it the original way so I can keep wondering why they’d want to eat something as awful as that.<\/p>\n I want to go back to those days when I ate bitter gourd with my face all scrunched up and when chilli brought tears to my eyes.<\/p>\n Dang it! Let the bitter gourd be bitter! Let the chilli be hot! Let suffering return to the dinner table! Let’s bring true meaning to “Be thankful you have something to eat!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Am I the only person who thinks our local chilli isn’t hot any longer? I don’t have a high tolerance for chilli. And for many years – even till when I started working, I found that chilli could make me cry. Yes, the ordinary chilli you buy from the wet market – it has no … <\/p>\n