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[scourge728]

I mean to be fair, I've never just eaten an onion before

[Kagus]

You can get small slices/chunks of onion in all sorts of stuff. Salads, burgers, salsa, etc... Too spicy for her.

What's funny though is that her partner (don't know if they're married, actually. But she's been with him for as long as I've known either of them,  so it's close enough) will eat just about anything, partly because he's actually an adventurous sort and partly because he's only got about 20% of his sense of smell/taste left.

[Teneb]

You live in a bleak wasteland of flavour and I weep for your people.

I actually have friends who are like that and claim they dislike anything with the midlest ammount of "spicyness", even stuff like garlic and onion. So obviously I ate an entire raw onion in front of them because someone had to do it.

[Dunamisdeos]

I just kept sneaking garlic and onions and cayenne pepper into my wife's food and now it's fine. No joke.

[TamerVirus]

Looks like some folks here need to take a trip to Flavortown!

[Hanslanda]

Wow. We usually don't eat spicy foods much, but we actually eat truly spicy stuff sometimes. O.o I can't imagine a world without flavor variety.

[NJW2000]

How do you live with such rampant blandness

Immigrants. They come into this country, bringing their strange and bizarre culture involving spices and actual vegetables, setting up specialist grocery stores to tend to the needs of the Forner xenoedit population.

Also setting up fusion restaurants that don't really serve anything and aren't even related to the country of the people working there, but are considered authentic because the staff are brown. Most of the poor bastards are so traumatized by Norwegian tastes that you need to go through a whole nudge-wink routine to get the good stuff.

Yes, I actually want it to be spicy. Yes, I know what a lentil is. Yes, I know what part of the cow that's from, and I'm fine with it. Please no ranch dressing.


For comparison, my full-blooded Norwegian grandmother cannot eat raw onion, because it is too spicy.

Norwegians, eh?

In a country like England, with a fairly multicultural cuisine (properish curries, spicy kebabs etc being most of the fast food), you really want to watch out for authentic foreign cooking.

I first learnt the distinction between UK-hot and foreign-hot when wandering into a well-reviewed place in Chinatown, seemingly like the places all around it, and following some really good starters with a chili peanut soup.

The main ingredient was not peanut.

After ten minutes of slurping up noodles in what felt to me like a mixture of hot oil and extra strong chili table sauce straight from the bottle, I conceded defeat and resolved to always make sure the restaurant catered to the palate of my country before ordering spicy foreign food. I can handle our mouth-burners, but god damn I cannot handle theirs.

[Dunamisdeos]

I do not cook things that do not have some cayenne in it. Nobody knows what my secret ingredient is for all hot foods.

It might just be a little bit, but that tiny bit of spicy makes everything better.

[Kagus]

It might just be a little bit, but that tiny bit of spicy makes everything better.

It really does. I run out of cayenne flakes almost as often as I run out of black pepper. It's just one of those go-to spices for all manner of dishes.

How do you live with such rampant blandness

Immigrants. They come into this country, bringing their strange and bizarre culture involving spices and actual vegetables, setting up specialist grocery stores to tend to the needs of the Forner xenoedit population.

Also setting up fusion restaurants that don't really serve anything and aren't even related to the country of the people working there, but are considered authentic because the staff are brown. Most of the poor bastards are so traumatized by Norwegian tastes that you need to go through a whole nudge-wink routine to get the good stuff.

Yes, I actually want it to be spicy. Yes, I know what a lentil is. Yes, I know what part of the cow that's from, and I'm fine with it. Please no ranch dressing.


For comparison, my full-blooded Norwegian grandmother cannot eat raw onion, because it is too spicy.

Norwegians, eh?

In a country like England, with a fairly multicultural cuisine (properish curries, spicy kebabs etc being most of the fast food), you really want to watch out for authentic foreign cooking.

I first learnt the distinction between UK-hot and foreign-hot when wandering into a well-reviewed place in Chinatown, seemingly like the places all around it, and following some really good starters with a chili peanut soup.

The main ingredient was not peanut.

After ten minutes of slurping up noodles in what felt to me like a mixture of hot oil and extra strong chili table sauce straight from the bottle, I conceded defeat and resolved to always make sure the restaurant catered to the palate of my country before ordering spicy foreign food. I can handle our mouth-burners, but god damn I cannot handle theirs.

Y'know, funny thing about that... I spent 4-5 months in India back in 2008. Now, the rule of thumb is that the farther south you go in India, the hotter the food gets. We were primarily staying in Hyderabad, which is considered south-ish enough to have a lot of coconut and chili in their food, as well as being kind of a gastronomic capital.

Almost nothing we ate there even really registered on the fire alarm. There were some manchurians with a little piff to them, but for the most part the stuff we made and ate at home was far and away spicier than what they were serving. Really rather surprising.

I suppose we should've made the trip to Mumbai or something, but that didn't really fit into the schedule. We were in Goa for a bit, but that was even milder (potatoes, potatoes everywhere).


A sad thing to note is that my spiciness tolerance has definitely dropped from being here for as long as I have. It's exceptionally rare to find a place that actually manages to challenge or even stimulate my heat resistance. But, on the bright side, the Turkish shop across the road has finally started carrying proper rooster brand sriracha.

Bizarrely, the hottest thing I have ever eaten was actually here in Norway. There was a short-lived little restaurant that offered a challenge: Finish our hottest burger, and it's free. Fail miserably, and you pay double as well as getting your name put up on the hall of shame.

I got roped into eating this disaster by a journalist friend. They were doing a part on the restaurant, and had grabbed two guinea pigs to make the attempt.

I realized very quickly that the poor sap sitting next to me was completely out of his depth... When he affirmed his candidacy by boasting about ordering "spicy" kebabs on the weekend, I knew that he wasn't ready for the devilry the Portuguese bastard running the place had in store for us.


And, sure enough, when we finally got served the burgers and the games began, he took a single bite and immediately capitulated, spending the rest of the evening sipping milk. Me? I'm too stubborn. God I'm an idiot...

The burger was estimated at about 1,000,000 scoville. Yes, I finished it, along with the comparitively soothing habanero fries. It didn't stay down very long, but I got all of it down.



The restaurant went out of business a couple months later.

[Egan_BW]

Okay, so now everyone's talking about spicy food, but something else caught my eye about Kagus's post.
...The labeling on the back of food packages actually tells you the percentages of the ingredients on it in Norway? Damn, I wish they did that here.

[Kagus]

Okay, so now everyone's talking about spicy food, but something else caught my eye about Kagus's post.
...The labeling on the back of food packages actually tells you the percentages of the ingredients on it in Norway? Damn, I wish they did that here.

For some things, yes. Not for all ingredients, but the "primary" ingredients will often have a percentage attached to them. Everything is also required to have a per-100g breakdown of calories, kilocalories, carbs, fat and such, as opposed to doing it per "serving".

I don't know if it's required, but most products also list their price per kilo (or, in the case of toilet paper, price per meter) in addition to the price per unit. It's quite nice, at least for the times when they actually get it right... Not everyone setting up those labels is equally proficient tech-wise, so you sometimes end up with weirdness like a 1000g item showing a unit price of 47 and a kilo price of 112... Despite one unit weighing a kilo. Not entirely sure what happened there.

[Akura]

The only thing you get in the US in regards to proportions of ingredient lists is that ingredients are listed in order of greatest to least amount in it, and that might not even be entirely true. And that's not touching on the topic of the ingredient lists being at all truthful; I'd still like to know what this "natural flavor" stuff comes from and why everything needs it.


Also, too be fair, I don't think I could stand to eat raw onion. Raw garlic is hard enough and raw leek felt like a tear-gassing. At the same time, though, I do enjoy cayenne pepper flakes on nearly everything as well.

[Kagus]

I remember there was some kerfuffle a long time ago regarding an organic-marked ketchup and the red coloring used in its production. They were using cochineal red. So, desiccated and powdered bug shells.

People rioted. "How can you label this as organic?!", they cried. Uh... Dude. That's about as natural as it gets. Just because you're averse to the idea of eating bugs doesn't make it dangerous or synthetic.


That said, "natural flavoring" really can mean a whole lot of things. And then there's the fun of ingredients companies are allowed to exclude from the list because it was used for "processing" the product, and thus doesn't count as an ingredient.

[overseer05-15]

I fill shotglasses with green onions and consume them. Mostly to see the looks on peoples faces, but I do like green onion.

[Dunamisdeos]

Onion you glad I didn't say banana

This is the onion thread now