What’s shakin, cocktail fans?
Welcome to Episode 179 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast! I’m your host, Modern Bar Cart CEO, Eric Kozlik. Thanks for joining me for another installment of our Breaking Bloody series, where we’ve been systematically disassembling the Bloody Mary cocktail so that you can better understand each of its myriad components.
This time around, we’re getting saucy, maybe a little zesty, and perhaps un poco picante. That’s right, we’re talking about spice, that flavor that puts some pep in your step and some fire in your belly. This episode goes out to all you pepper-heads out there who enjoy some sweat on your brow and some zing in your chow, you hard-charging capsaicin crusaders, Sriracha muchachas, and Cholula chieftains. To be Frank, it’s gonna be a red-hot ride, so hold on to your scovilles, pour yourself a glass of milk, and for the love of God, keep your hands away from your eyes (and other sundry mucous membranes).
Of course, I couldn’t tackle this inferno on my own. I am just one man, after all. So I enlisted the help of a few companions who are better versed than I in the chemesthetic realm of trigeminal flavor experience.
First up, there’s Dr. Alissa Nolden. She’s a flavor scientist at the University of Massachusetts who studies how people experience the sensation of spicy compounds like capsaicin (and, as luck would have it, ethanol).
Next, meet John Shope. John is a friend of mine (and Virginia Sales Manager at Catoctin Creek Distilling Co.), but for the purpose of this episode, he’s our human crash test dummy who agreed to take a ramekin of the world’s spiciest sauces straight to the face and walk us through what happens in his body as the trauma sets in.
Rounding out our panel of experts is Sarah Kolk. She’s a food scientist at Silver Spring Foods, makers of some of the world’s finest horseradish products, and she’s here to explain that second variety of spice experience, derived not from peppers, but from innocent-looking tubers.
This episode, we’ll hear primarily from Alissa and John, and next time around Sarah is going to take the reins and show us a thing or two about horseradish.
In any conversation about chemesthesis, I find it helpful to define the compounds you’re looking at and what they bring to the table in terms of flavor. First, there’s capsaicin, which is normally incorporated into the Bloody Mary via hot sauce or cayenne pepper. Then, of course, there’s horseradish, which derives its spice from an interaction between a couple different compounds.
These are the two spice ingredients you’re going to encounter in the lion’s share of Bloody Mary recipes. But we do have to throw in a couple honorable mentions here to piperine – which is the active substance in peppercorns and cubebs – and, of course, ethanol – which also elicits a burning or hot sensation at certain concentrations.
Dr. Alissa Nolden studies how people experience spicy substances by running carefully controlled studies where participants are trained to use special intensity scales to rate how spicy (or bitter, or salty, etc.) a substance feels in their mouth. And if you’re wondering, capsaicin research has actually come a long way in the past decade or two because we’re only just recently able to really isolate this compound and carefully titrate it to exact, experimentally manipulatable levels. Dr. Nolden States:
What I found really interesting with this research is you’re giving participants pure concentrations of ethanol or capsaicin diluted in water. So you’re presenting them with something very basic that they wouldn’t necessarily come across in everyday life. But you can still learn so much about what they’re perceiving. It’s very complicated to give someone something like a Bloody Mary where it’s very complex and diverse and try to understand what they’re perceiving. So we break it down and look at end of it like a single concentration or single compound, and we would present them at different concentrations.
According to Dr. Nolden, one fascinating thing to examine is how much spicy food participants eat at home. Those who tend to eat spicy food (or prefer spicy salsa to mild salsa) often rate higher concentrations of capsaicin as being more mild than those participants who have less experience with spicy foods. According to Alissa:
You can learn to like something even if your first experience is really intense. And a good way to explain that is kind of learning to like bitter beers or or learning to like bitter coffee. First you add a lot of cream and sugar and then over time you learn to like that bitterness. And I think that’s what might be the case for spicy foods. The more that you eat it, the more that you learn to like it.
This was certainly the case for our friend, John Shope. When I asked him if he was naturally predisposed to enjoying spicy flavors, or if he developed that passion over time, he had a very definitive (and vivid) answer:
I was pranked as a as a younger kid by my older sister. She gave me one of those Chinese like dried peppers that have been covered in sauce or just looked all sticky and sweet. And she told me it was a Twizzlers and I might have been six and I ate it. And she’s just on the phone with one of her friends laughing at me while I’m, like, dying in the bathroom.
For many people, this experience would have been enough to turn them off to spice altogether. However, something in John’s personality kept him coming back. Over the years, he maintained a healthy curiosity of (and respect for) spicy peppers and sauces. Eventually, he would work himself up to tasting the legendary ghost pepper while working in the kitchen at a restaurant. These days, he says that Sriracha is like ketchup for him, and he’s constantly thrill-seeking newer and spicier flavor experiences.
Unfortunately for John, he isn’t about to shoot a ramekin full of Sriracha. Whereas Alissa in her university setting is confined to operating within the safety rails prescribed by internal review boards, we here at Modern Bar Cart like to live on the wild side a little bit and indulge ourselves not so much in the center of the bell curve, but in those racy edge cases. That’s where John comes in. Here he is explaining what he’s about to consume as he stands at the precipice of his plunge into a fiery world of capsaicin:
I made a combination of two hot sauces: one that’s just super obnoxious and one that has become quite popular through certain YouTube channels that people recognizably know. So I combined Da Bomb, which is a habanero smoked Chipotle hot sauce with something called Mad Dog 357, which is made from capsaicin extract. A Carolina Reaper (on the low end is) 1.4 million Scovilles, Mad Dog 357 is around six million. I’ve got two teaspoons in here and it’s a very painful thing and I’m only doing it because I think people have been like, what hurts this guy? And I’m confident that this is not going to feel good.
After explaining the murderous contents combined in an innocuous-looking ramekin (something that might otherwise hold a nice dollop of ketchup or garlic-Parmesan sauce), he just shot it. Bottoms-up. Straight to the face. Here he is describing exactly what it felt like as the sauce ravaged his senses:
It’s got instantaneous saliva, outbursts of receptors are reacting, I’m feeling the heat coming right through here. It’s coating my entire palate and it’s not dissipating – the heat is not in one specific location. It is literally all over the entire palate and it’s moving up to the front, which is causing me to salivate insanely.
Talking is making me lick my lips, which is a horrible, bad idea, because now my lips feel like they’re burning because those are that’s now attach itself to the lips. It’s slowly moving down the esophagus. I’m starting to feel it in the back of the throat. Works like a sticky heat. And it’s it is pungent. It’s like a little small barnyard fire right there in the back of the palate.
I don’t know if you can see it, but my eyes are starting to water.
[Hiccups]
Oh. Oh, that was a bad thing. When it gets really hot, sometimes people hiccup because you’re breathing so much, and that’s always bad because then I can get into your lungs and that gives you that sensation. Oh, God. Here we go. That gives you that sensation of heartburn.
My whole face feels like it’s pretty much on fire. I’m sweating on the sides of my neck here, down the back here. my forehead…I mean, it looks like I just came out of the rain or something. I’m starting to really sweat.
If you listen to the audio clip, you’ll also hear that at a certain point John started experiencing a type of euphoria that caused him to laugh out-loud, and this thrilling sensation is not uncommon among people who seek out extreme levels of spice. Many psychologists refer to this tendency to enjoy painful or aversive experiences as “benign masochism.,” which is a term that I learned several years ago from friend of the podcast Dr. Dan McCall, who runs the Gettysburg Odor and Flavor lab at my alma mater, Gettysburg College. According to Dan, it was coined by a gentleman named Paul Rozin out of the University of Pennsylvania a few decades ago. Here’s Dr. McCall with a working definition:
Intense heat from peppers is very painful, and usually we reject painful things. But yet we like negative stimulation in the case of horror films, or rollercoasters…so we embrace these things that are a little aversive in contexts in which we can control them.
Dan was also kind enough to provide me with some research papers on this subject, and although we don’t have time to do a full literature review, I thought I’d pull out some of the main themes for you.
In a 2013 summary paper, Paul Rozin and colleagues were able to pull out some general trends associated with benign masochism across a wide variety of human activities. For example, watching very scary or sad movies, the taste of strong alcohol, bitterness, or capsaicin, disgusting jokes, thrill rides, and even the “hurts so good” physical pain of an intense massage.
A couple findings that I found really interesting from this research were that A.) people tend to enjoy their physiological reactions to negative experiences, and B.) people most enjoy levels of discomfort that are juuuust on the tolerable side of uncomfortable. This second fact, to me, could have huge implications on how we can think about the role of spice in a Bloody Mary.
Another paper by Bastian and colleagues summarizes three different studies conducted to explore the relationship between physical pain and flavor perception. They discovered three significant findings:
FIrst, physical pain is linked to greater enjoyment of a flavor. So in essence, participants were split into “pain” and “no pain” conditions and then asked to eat a chocolate flavored biscuit. Those in the pain condition rated their liking of the biscuit as significantly higher.
Next, the researchers found that physical pain increases perceived intensity of tastes. So, same kind of “pain” and “no pain” conditions, and the participants in the pain group rated sweet, sour, salty, and bitter tastes as more intense than the people in the no pain condition.
Finally, they demonstrated that pain made people more sensitive to the presence of a flavor by demonstrating that participants in a pain condition were much more likely to correctly identify a flavor extract at lower concentrations than those in a non-pain condition.
In short, pain makes us enjoy flavors more, experience them more intensely, and identify them with great sensitivity. So I think the logical takeaway here is that if you want people to enjoy eating at your restaurant or drinking at your cocktail bar just that little bit more, you need to hire a spanking sommelier who can go around and inflict just the right amount of pain on your guests. It would be kind of a 21st century update to the professional foot ticklers employed by the court of Catherine the Great.
I’m not kidding about that one. Look it up.
If there’s anything that this research demonstrates, it’s that we don’t want THAT much spice in our Bloody Marys. It sends us back to a word that some more experienced home bartenders take for granted: balance. But this isn’t just about modulating sweet and sour, like in a daiquiri. We’ve got pretty much every possible flavor bouncing around in the Bloody Mary, and somehow, we’re supposed to bring them all into harmony. This task is further complicated by the fact that in most recipes, you’re going to have multiple sources of spice, acid, and umami.
So in the perfect Bloody Mary, we want spice, but not too much. And the kicker is that the definition of what constitutes “too much” is going to vary from person to person, creating not only a flavor problem, but also a language problem. Thinking back to our benign masochism research, is there a world in which everyone could have the perfect level of spice for their palate? Is there a way to bring each individual riiiight to the edge of discomfort, but not cross the line?
Perhaps not.
But I do think there are ways to present Bloody Marys on a cocktail menu in a way that comes close. The key, it would seem, is to give people options.’
Think about other situations where there’s an objective flavor fact that you need to communicate to people. My go-to example here is the doneness of a burger or a piece of meat, which can be communicated using a number (i.e. internal temperature) or a trade term (like “medium rare”). When I, as a patron, say “medium rare,” you, as a chef, know exactly how to prepare that food to give me exactly what I want.
A simpler example could simply be the little chili pepper scores next to different dishes on a Thai menu, for example. No chilis means mild, and the more chilis you add on, the spicier it gets. This may be a slightly blunter instrument than temperature-correlated doneness, but it still helps get people into the right neighborhood where they want to be.
So if you were to ask me how I’d try to give people their perfect Bloody Mary if I ran a cocktail bar, here’s what I’d do.
I’d try to have three different Bloody Mary mixes on-hand – mild, medium, and spicy. I’d take my time developing these mixes and have them evaluated by people who self-identify as enjoying each of those spice levels. This is important, right? You don’t want a spice lover giving you feedback on your mild bloody mix. That just doesn’t make sense. And in addition to dialing in the flavors, I’d also work to ensure that my spice levels remained vibrant and stable in each of these mixes, rather than degrading. More on this subject in part II, where we talk horseradish.
In terms of service, it seems like there’s an opportunity to use garnishes creatively. I’d craft a garnish to go with each of my different spice levels, which is great for the customers because they get a more tailored experience from a culinary standpoint, and also great for bartenders and servers because they’ll know which drink has what spice level just by looking at the garnish. That means there’s less risk of giving a fiery inferno of a drink to someone who doesn’t want one, and let’s be honest, in busy brunch situations or at high volume establishments, mistakes like that are easy to make.
So, even though I think we’re a far cry from being able to dial in the parts-per-million of capsaicin in your Bloody Mary, I think that creating options for people who have different relationships with spicy flavors is a great way to honor both the cocktail and the person who orders it.
I’m Modern Bar Cart CEO, Eric Kozlik. I hope you enjoyed part one of this Breaking Bloody spice showcase. Be sure to join us next time for a horseradish tasting and analysis with our friend Sarah Kolk from Silver Spring Foods, but until then keep your masochism benign and be kind to your trigeminal nerve.
Cheers.
This episode was produced and edited by Cera Baker, with original music by Patrick Kilgannon and Purple Planet Music.
