mckenzie malanaphy

Or am I getting tougher?

The time I spent living in Asia was like bootcamp for spiciness. So I was surprised when a recent batch of homemade chili oil knocked me on my ass. It didn’t take long to identify the culprit. I’d tried using a new type of chili—a small, glossy, triangular variety from Sichuan, the Chinese province famous for embracing spice. The result might have made even the Sichuanese sweat.

Whenever I experience something that is both extremely spicy and delicious, I think of Fuchsia Dunlop’s fantastic cookbook, The Food of Sichuan. Specifically, I am reminded of the dish titled “Tragically Hot” Water Spinach Salad. Every time I leaf past this recipe I smile, because it so accurately captures the mixed agony and pleasure of spicy food. People who don’t care for spicy food find our devotion confounding at best, masochistic at worst. But as someone who enjoys fiery soups and tingling sauces, the phrase tragically hot is endearing, evocative, and even a little funny. I am a slave to my chili oil’s smoky fragrance, willfully seeking its abusive embrace.

Without chili oil, it is impossible to cook certain Chinese dishes. It brings energy, vitality and balance. In its absence, these dishes are unwell. Like a plant without sun or a person in the dead of winter, they become pale and depressed.

One of the things I cherish most about China (and Asia on the whole) is its phenomenal cuisine. While there, I enjoyed transcendent meals in all manner of settings. My knowledge of flavors and ingredients expanded, as did my understanding of how dishes could be composed. Ultimately, my tastes and expectations evolved. After returning to the Midwest, the only way to experience many of these flavors again was to make them myself. (One exception to this rule is the wonderful Hmong food found throughout the Minneapolis area, thanks to the many Minnesotans with ties to Vietnam, Laos, South China and Thailand.) Hence, it became necessary to try my hand at making a chili oil, among many, many other things.

As I ate my way through this especially strong batch of oil, I was surprised to notice myself using more and more. Slowly, I had graduated from a smattering of crimson freckles to formidable puddles that dyed my noodles red. Which led me to wonder, is my chili oil getting milder, or am I getting tougher?

Alas, the internet is divided (as is my household).

When it comes to the aging of chili oil, chilis and hot sauce, the answers aren’t clear. There seems to be consensus that the “flavor” of dried chilis dulls over time, but this consensus does not extend to the impact of age on spiciness. The subject of refrigeration is also contentious (some say it undermines flavor and texture, while others believe it delays rancidity).

I did learn that a chili’s fire comes from an irritant called capsaicin. Capsaicin, apparently, is very durable. It isn’t water-soluble, so rinsing or boiling has no diminishing powers. And it’s considered heat-stable below 400 degrees. So beyond fire-blasting your peppers to ash, or painstakingly removing most of their seeds, membrane and pith (varying degrees of feasible when the peppers at hand are dried), their hotness may more or less be here to stay.

Equally important, a quick googling of “capsaicin aging” revealed an endless scroll of articles on how capsaicin is *PROVEN* to fight human aging (what a relief!). However, results addressing whether the compound itself ages were elusive. According to the website called Mikey V Foods (“Veteran-owned, Texas-proud”), “it depends.”

So I guess we’ll never know.