Strap on your gas masks and hazmat suits, everybody, habaneros are finally in season here in old SoCal. What does this mean? For most, nothing. For the humble Rustic Canyon Bar Program, however, we like to get to work and make two types of our own bitters out of all this nonsense. We do one with alcohol and one without. How do we do this? Read on, but realize it’s going to be a couple of parts because I’m running out of time. Hey man, this is post #256. I said I was going to do this for three months but my odd combination of intense and life altering ADHD (more on that later) and mild OCD has created something in me that just continues.

Can’t stop, won’t stop.

The common habanero, a pepper you can find at your local Whole Foods, represents the next level of pepper that you just don’t want to fuck around with. In your culinary travels you may have handled a Thai chili or serrano, possibly even a cayenne or a dundicot in your time and thought you were ready for the upgrade, but no. There’s levels to the Scoville game. The difference between a random Thai chili in your take out that carved a twisted, searing path through your digestive tract like a radioactive hot coal and a habanero is three fold. It a progresses in weird tiers. There’s big jumps between the jalapeño to the serrano, the serrano to the Thai chili, and the Thai chili to the habanero. For a more visual aid, let’s take a look at the Scoville chart together:

A couple of things for the uninitiated. Capsaicin is the compound that causes you pain when you eat a hot pepper. That’s right, the pepper itself may have flavor, but it’s the chemical component, capsaicin, that literally causes you pain and creates either the sensation to run away and never eat a hot pepper again or take to it and want more like a pure masochist. The sweating, the itchy scalp, the sear is all due to this and it takes time to build up a tolerance. Most want nothing to do with it, but some, like myself, actually like it. chalk it up to self flagellation for crimes perpetrated in a past life.

And who or what is Scoville? Well, he was a man, Wilbur Scoville, a pharmacist, who developed the Scoville organoleptic test which measures the capsaicin.

So what do we do with these puppies once we have them? Stay tuned for part two tomorrow. Yeah, big cliffhanger.