A Review by Michael Stone
Enter the Habanero: How I Learned to Cook
I’ve never done recipes or rules particularly well. I forget them, get anxious scrutinizing a measurement, scratching my head because an ingredient is missing. So around the time I graduated college and went off meal plan, I gave up completely, but even during college I would experiment. I found some prickly pear at the store, some aloe leaves. Of course I ate them raw. Didn’t know you were supposed to cook those. But I also found a pack of curious little orange peppers at the Mexican grocery store where I would shop. I brought them back, showed them to my roommate, he thought they were nice. I never read the label. We popped through the plastic wrap and pulled out individual orange peppers measuring about two inches in every direction. Up to this point I had only had experience with red or green bell peppers — certainly a nice, mild, perhaps juicy, vegetable. We took our peppers to the dorm bathroom, rinsed them off, and promptly popped them in our mouths. Enter the habanero.
When you first bite into a pepper there’s a resinous juiciness living in the shell. And a crunch. You crunch and the shell cracks and pepper juice leaks from the walls, some spraying into your mouth, some dripping into the cavity of the pepper. As you bite down further you find the pepper collapsing, the inner structure is disrupted, and you start to feel a slight sting in your cheeks from where the juice sprayed. You haven’t really tasted the pepper yet. Maybe the roof of your mouth rubs against the seeds hidden within which hang from the inside-part of the stem. I don’t know what that’s called, I don’t know much about pepper anatomy. Sometimes those flakey seeds are free-floating in the pepper’s cavity. Now the whole thing is in your mouth, a carbolic mess, you’re just chewing. No problems yet. Don’t worry. And as the mash wrinkles in your mouth some things start happening very quickly.
Maybe before you even taste the pepper thoroughly, your mouth is pricked, like, a thousand times. It’s like your mouth is trying to sweat. Simultaneously your eyes might water or your face might perspire. Don’t touch your eyes — you’ve got that juice on your hand now, maybe you should put the stem in the garbage. And you’re salivating, like the flood-release valve in your brain just activated. This is when the spice starts to travel, as your mouth does what it does, digesting the food, and as your saliva drips through the seeds and sloshes around your teeth and down your throat, you go to another plane of existence.
You swallow the pepper as quickly as possible because you realize what’s happening to you. There’s no way out — milk doesn’t work, water spreads the disease, maybe you could eat some bread (?) and see if that helps (?). It doesn’t. You have to just go with it.
The habanero flavor is distinct from the jalapeño. While in general habaneros are spicier, there is a significant variance in the spice level of both peppers. The jalapeño and the habanero, in culinary terms, can be compared to the tomatillo and the tomato. The jalapeño tastes a bit more like a plant. It has a rank oiliness. They’re also green. The habanero has a sharper spice, but a softer flavor. It’s orange and pairs well with honey or tropical fruits, hence the popularity of mango-habanero sauces. A habanero tastes like a hot beach walk. A jalapeño tastes like someone in a back alley is trying to jump you with a curling iron.
I love habaneros. The spice can be more intense, but I find the flavor more satisfying than a jalapeño. I put habanero hot sauce on everything from tacos to pizza. How did that first traumatic experience transform me into a major fan?
I don’t know. There’s something to be said about the bland midwest pallet — maybe I was looking for an alternative. There’s something to be said for masochism — it’s fun to train yourself to tolerate a certain amount of pain. Despite their popularity in the hot sauce world, I stumbled into habanero love almost by accident. Habaneros have helped me establish my own rhythms of eating and cooking. As someone who usually hates being in the kitchen, I’m interested in what I can do with habaneros more than any other food. Whether in guacamole, ramen, or raw from the package, the habanero belongs in my diet.
Habaneros are continually out of my comfort zone. But I go back to them because they force me to reimagine eating and reaffirm a base-level of conscientiousness about cooking. I eat better because of habaneros, though my bowel movement is strange.
I guess I dare you to eat a habanero this summer. Go into your backyard, sit in a pool or something. It’ll suck but you’ll have eaten a habanero, a remarkable sensory experience you might want to have again.
Michael Stone is a poet from Kalamazoo, MI but the only way to read his work is to make him food. He works in youth development in Grand Rapids and makes music under the name Desert Golfer.