I’m talking about the burning feeling you get when eating chillis,
raw onions, and other food. I’m looking for a way to explain that I do not like that burning feeling, be it onions, chillis, a spicy sauce or anything else that burns in my mouth. I will refer to this feeling as spicy-hot even though some of you might disagree, but I am looking for a better way to call food which gives me this feeling.
And if there isn’t one word for this, how could one phrase a sentence
explaining that one does not like food to be spicy-hot AT ALL, no matter how
little. Some people refer to a little bit spicy-hot as not spicy-hot at all,
because they are used to such very spicy-hot food so they do not consider some
food as being spicy-hot even though others do.
I found this quote in the Wikipedia article on
pungency:
The pungent sensation provided by chilli peppers, black pepper, and other
spices like ginger and horseradish.
That article also mentioned piquancy:
The term piquancy (/ˈpiːkənsi/) is sometimes applied to foods with a lower
degree of pungency that is “agreeably stimulating to the palate.”
Examples of piquant food include mustard and curry.
I found this
article
about pungency that isn’t related to capsaicin, but it still didn’t give me
a specific word or phrase I could use to explain it with. I also found a scale for onions and garlic on Wikipedia, the pyruvate scale.
Here are places I would want to use this word I don’t have:
A guy working at a falafel store: Would you like your falafel with wasabi?
Me: No thanks I would like it completely _______ (not burning my tongue).The guy from the falafel store: onions?
Me: No thanks I would like it completely _______ (not burning my tongue).The guy from the falafel store: chillis ?
Me: No thanks I would like it completely _______ (not burning my tongue).
Is there a way to say "I'm a wuss and can't take anything spicy not even the mildest stuff NOTHING"? (Pardon my French.)
I have tried looking up hot and spicy on thesaurus, but I found nothing
satisfying. I think “mild” is not a good fit, because one person’s “mild”
is another’s “spicy”. Also negating is not good, because people use “it’s
not spicy” as “it’s not that spicy”. Negating is also not perfect, because people do not consider many things as spicy and assume I mean no spicy sauce when I mean I want NOTHING that's going to burn in my mouth.
Best Answer
Contrary to what you may think, the single word that people actually use to distinguish from spicy is:
This is often used to see how spicy you want something:
That's the continuum. If you are talking about other dimensions of seasoning, like say turmeric or horseradish or bay leaf or rosemary, range is 'heavily seasoned' to 'bland' (having little to no taste at all).
Your observation that one person's mild is another's too spicy is simply a matter of psychology. The word 'mild' means 'not spicy', the opposite of spicy.
If you want to make sure that something has no capsicum style seasoning at all but not bland, which is to say if you want to say something that is out of the ordinary (which this is) , you have to use more than one word.
or whatever extent you care for. And for your given sentences:
It seems here though it's not a word choice problem but how food prep and requests work. When you buy some prepared food, there's the basics and then some extras. At some places, they ask you about every single extra ingredient. At some places, they put most of it together as the basics, then you can add a couple of things like, hot sauce or pickles or whatever. If they ask if you want hot sauce and you don't like hot things, then just say 'no thanks'. If it's still too hot, then maybe it's not mild enough for you.