If you’re like me, you like, no love, the flavor of the habanero, but the burn can be a little too much for your Northeasternly suburb rooted sensibilities. Yeah, I look forward to the singe, the blaze, the smolder, the lips afire, but something really happens to my white bread physiognomy when I go too far up the Scoville ladder of doom. Watery eyes and sinuses, insane sweating, an increased pulse, itchy scalp and palms. The gamut of what would look to be, from an outsider’s prospective, some extreme sort of illicit drug binge withdrawal. Yes, this is actually enjoyable. Egads I do love the habanero, it has crazy flavor, but it’s a slippery slope to navigate upon because when you get too close to the edge the evil culinary hand of greed will push you off into an abyss of pain and you’ll have to change your shirt before the doors open and go into the bathroom to dry your hair with paper towels due to the extreme perspiration.

Anyway, there’s a solution, and it’s called the habanada.

For those who don’t know, it’s a habanero without capsaicin. Yup. Hence the “nada” part. Get it?

But it’s a double edged sword, this little, orange hybrid harbinger of false doom. I like it because I can enjoy the flave I so enjoy and put it into cocktails without killing the residents of Santa Monica. I hate it because sometimes I think to myself that the habanero flavor must be earned and the only way that is allowed to happen is to get tough and just start eating lots of peppers. They’re good for your capillaries after all. Yeah, build yourself up, dude. Start slow with some jalapeños and move up the ladder to serrano, graduate to Thai chili, and then bit by wanna be Chernobyl bit take a small chomp of habanero at a time until you’ve become a total champ and can eventually handle it. This takes time, dedication, and absence of fear. Peppers create actual pain and few can handle what even the lame ones bring. The habanero is in that upper echelon, the olympic level heat that’s hard to toy with. Even the latino dudes at work are wary. They know too well that you dab and sprinkle, never slather.

But we love that floral, fruity flavor those little orange guys bring.

The solution? Enter the habanada. Some veggie breeder geek named Michael Mazourek brought us this after 13 generations of breeding. The big landing date was 2007. I was in New York at the time, coincidentally my first ever front of the house job where I forgot the face of my forefathers, began waiting tables, and began the steady decline into a dark depression that would last until the winter of 2012 and culminate in me waking up in a neck brace looking up at a nurse and the bleak proletariat fluorescent lights of a hospital room. A torrid tale for another time.

Anyway, I wouldn’t hear speak of a habanada until many years later, maybe 2016, 2017?

Back to the issue at hand. I hope you know what I mean and why I struggle. To me, the habanada represents the participation trophy of the vegetable world. Do you hear my battle cry? Before these guys existed it was a badge of honor to enjoy the habanero. It was one of those vegetables only the chosen few got to enjoy because they killed themselves getting up there to the pinnacle of pepperdom. Now, people can just take the elevator. Whatever your opinion, it’s a two sided symbol signifying humanity getting better through the magic of technology as well as us growing weaker due to that same miracle brought upon by the better life.

Dude, it’s just a fucking pepper.

Yeah, yeah.