We really need a decent scale for spicyness of foods. The mild/medium/spicy thing is by far too unspecific.
There’s an Indian place down the road that we sometimes order from. I like moderate levels of spicy, so it works well for me. But my wife dislikes hot spicy foods at all. So when I ordered the food I asked if the dish is completely non-spicy, and they confirmed that it was completely non-spicy, and it was too spicy for my wife.
Afaik scoville only works for chilli peppers. It doesn’t work for other spicy things like e.g. pepper and it doesn’t work for prepared dishes either.
So you can say “This dish contains chilli peppers with X scoville”, but since the amount of chilli in there also matters, that’s only part of the equation. For example, a single drop of 100 000 scoville chilli pepper on a whole plate of otherwise non-spicy food might be less spicy than e.g. a dish consisting almost entirely of 30 000 scoville chilli peppers.
Seems like something where you could ask where eating a whole jalapeno falls on their spiciness scale, because that’s a very mild pepper and as someone who likes moderate spice and enjoys jalapeno based dishes, that seems like a very good anchor to start with
Maybe that could replace the scale actually. “This dish is equivalent to 5 pepper corns. This one here is equivalent to a jalapeno. This one is equivalent to a habanero.” and so on.
We really need a decent scale for spicyness of foods. The mild/medium/spicy thing is by far too unspecific.
There’s an Indian place down the road that we sometimes order from. I like moderate levels of spicy, so it works well for me. But my wife dislikes hot spicy foods at all. So when I ordered the food I asked if the dish is completely non-spicy, and they confirmed that it was completely non-spicy, and it was too spicy for my wife.
Scoville?
cassandrafatigue already suggested that, and I answered below that: https://lemmy.world/comment/21043110
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Afaik scoville only works for chilli peppers. It doesn’t work for other spicy things like e.g. pepper and it doesn’t work for prepared dishes either.
So you can say “This dish contains chilli peppers with X scoville”, but since the amount of chilli in there also matters, that’s only part of the equation. For example, a single drop of 100 000 scoville chilli pepper on a whole plate of otherwise non-spicy food might be less spicy than e.g. a dish consisting almost entirely of 30 000 scoville chilli peppers.
There’s math to be done here.
Seems like something where you could ask where eating a whole jalapeno falls on their spiciness scale, because that’s a very mild pepper and as someone who likes moderate spice and enjoys jalapeno based dishes, that seems like a very good anchor to start with
That’s not a bad idea, actually.
Maybe that could replace the scale actually. “This dish is equivalent to 5 pepper corns. This one here is equivalent to a jalapeno. This one is equivalent to a habanero.” and so on.