Fun & Learning | Page 22 of 33

Which Countries Have The Spiciest Food?

Spicy food is popular all over the world. Almost every country with a well-developed food culture has at least one dish where the heat from chile peppers serves as one of the main components in the flavor profile. That said, some countries place more of …

Does Hoisin Sauce Go Bad?

by Matt Bray

If you like cooking Chinese food, you will need a few staple spices and condiments. Hoisin sauce is one of the essential ingredients. It is right up there with sesame oil in terms of how often you will be called on to use it when preparing Chinese dishes. Even with many ways to use it, you will probably not use a whole container at one time, which means that its shelf life comes into play. Does hoisin sauce go bad? Yes, but not if you use it quickly and/or store it correctly for extended shelf life.

Can Dogs Eat Spicy Food?

by Matt Bray

If you like spicy foods, it is only natural to wonder whether your dog might like them too. Certainly, many dogs will show a strong interest in their owners’ food no matter how spicy it is. But is it a good idea to feed spicy food to your dog? Let’s take a deeper dive into how your four-legged friend may react to these more extreme eats.

What Are Nightshades? How Alkaloids Affect Your Health

by Matt Bray

Hot peppers have an infamous family…

The nightshade family is flowering plants also known by their Latin name Solanaceae. There are more than 2,000 plants in this family, including hot peppers and sweet peppers. Most of these nightshades are not eaten as food and are in fact, poisonous. The long list of nightshade fruits and vegetables, though, also includes many fruit and vegetable kitchen staples including chili peppers, sweet peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, tomatillos, and goji berries. Nightshade plants all have certain distinctive traits in common including the shape of their flowers. They also contain compounds that may have negative effects on your health (but also many positive health benefits as well).

Minorcan Mike’s Datil Pepper Salsa: Deep Sweet

by Matt Bray

First things first: We love Minorcan Mike’s Datil Pepper Sauce (see the review here.) Its sweet, spicy, and unexpectedly complex flavor hit all the right notes for a datil pepper hot sauce. So learning that there’s a salsa option, too, is a terrific spicy snacking gift! Minorcan Mike’s Datil Pepper Salsa pretty much provides more of the same, which is a very good thing. This is one tasty sweet salsa, which – while not quite the flavor depth of the sauce – provides a bold sweet flavor with plenty of datil heat.

Six Spicy Popcorn Recipes That Bring The Boom!

by Matt Bray

Let’s get ready for some snacktime sizzle…

What an amazing snack popcorn is. You can go simple with a little salt and butter and be perfectly happy. You can dress it up with chocolate, caramel, and other sweets. Or you can fire it up with bold spices to bring the boom to your snack bowl. We love spicy popcorn recipes, and these five from our recipe archives are sure to bring the boom at snack time.

A wooden plate of sliced boiled octopus dusted with paprika and coarse salt, with two terracotta dishes of paprika, dried round red peppers and a tipped tin spilling paprika on a butcher-block counter

Spanish Paprika 101: The Types And How It’s Made

by Matt Bray

What Spanish paprika (pimentón) is, how La Vera’s smoked paprika and Murcia’s sweet paprika are made, what dulce, agridulce and picante mean, and how to cook with it.

A bowl of deep red Hungarian paprika with a wooden spoon, beside dried red paprika pods and a small dish of lighter orange-red paprika on an oak table

Hungarian Paprika 101: The Types And What Makes It Different

by Matt Bray

What Hungarian paprika is, why it’s sweeter than most, how hot it gets, the eight Hungarian grades, where it came from, and how to cook with it.

Smoky Peppers: The Chilies That Bring The Smoke, Mild To Super-Hot

by Matt Bray

Smoky peppers from mild to super-hot, with heat ranges and a quick-reference table, where each one gets its smoke, and how to cook with them.

Big Peppers Guide: The Giants Of The Pepper Scale

by Matt Bray

For many, the bell pepper may be the biggest pepper they’ve ever seen. But there are more than a handful of peppers in the world that eclipse the bell. These big fruits are the giants of the pepper scale, yet they don’t have a level of heat that matches their frames. In fact, all the big peppers on our list are either mild or barely medium in overall spiciness, the spiciest never getting past the heat of a jalapeño pepper.