Spice – Other ‘hot’ spices

spices

The restaurant assured me that there was no chilli in the food but it was still too hot for me. What other spices, etc. can cause the heat effect in the mouth?
it was a Sri Lankan restaurant, very reputable. My host had mistakenly told the waiter that I was allergic to chilli – in fact I have LichenPlanus which me
ans I am super sensitive to anything hot or spicy.

Best Answer

"Hotness" is a quite vague description which can be caused by a number of chemical compounds and is percieved by various receptors.

  • Chili peppers (capsicum) contain the alkaloid capsaicin. If your restaurant insisted that there were no chilis included, there is a slight possibility that they used it under another name (ethnic restaurants or other regions of the world come to mind) e.g. "pereroni" or "paprika".
    (Not that I am implying anything here!)
  • Black pepper (piper nigrum) and long pepper contains another alkaloid, the piperine, which gives the seeds their hotness.
  • Ginger contains gingerol, which is chemically similar to capsicain and piperine and can be very hot, especially in dried ginger, which loses a lot of the lemony-freshness and gains hotness due to chemical processes that change gingerol into shoagol, which is about twice as "hot". Shoagol has about 160,000 SHU on the scoville scale - more than piperine, less that capsicain.
  • Sichuan pepper (no relative despite the name) creates a less-hot-more-numb-to-tingling feeling.
  • Mustard and horseradish (and to a lesser extent radishes, cress and other cruciferous plants / brassicaceae) contain glucosinolates, which we percieve as pungent, sharp or hot. An extreme example for glucosinolate-hotness is wasabi.
  • Raw garlic and raw onions contain allicin (or, in onions, isoalliin) that has a sharp/biting/hot taste and which contributes to the percieved hotness of fresh garlic and the teary-eyed effect when chopping onions. Interesting fact: Allicin binds both to the receptors that percieve the capsicain-hotness and those for mustard-hotness.
  • Cinnamon contains an aromatic essential oil with cinnamaldehyde as main component. The essential oil is very hot, hence cinnamon can taste very hot, especially in "generous" doses.
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