Habanero poppers

i've made a huge mistake

Hey, clowns!

As you all know, spicy food is cool as shit right now. There’s entire fast food chains dedicated to anus-burning stuff (like Dave’s Hot Chicken), you’re lucky if anything you eat today doesn’t have hot honey drizzled on it, and there’s even an incredibly popular talk show based around spicy food, Hot Ones.

The message is clear: If you do not enjoy spicy food, you must be a boring person. And if you already like spicy food, whatever level of heat you like is simply not enough, you wimpy little baby.

While Americans don’t traditionally have many foods that are innately considered to be spicy (aside from maybe Buffalo wings), there is one moderately spicy dish that some enjoy eating when they are out at a bar: jalapeño poppers.

Jalapeño poppers are sort of a weird excuse to eat something that’s been stuffed with cream cheese, breaded, and deep-fried. The spicy part is sort of incidental to the whole experience, but it does make things a little more interesting, especially if you get an unexpectedly fiery jalapeño. Most of the time, however, they are generally pretty tame.

In terms of Scoville units, the mysterious number people use to describe how spicy a pepper is, jalapeños tend to fall between the 2,500–8,000 range. Even though the units are listed in the thousands, in the scheme of things, this isn’t actually very high up on the overall pepper chart.

So I thought to myself, “Dannis Ree, even though you are the greatest food writer in all of history, sometimes you secretly don’t feel like a cool guy, deep inside your despair hole. You already like disgusting amounts of cream cheese. So why not turn a jalapeño popper into a new version that’s so spicy, people will be compelled to chase you down the street and congratulate you for eating it?”

Daydreaming of being a cool guy, I went to some Asian markets here in Chicago, where I perused a few types of spicy pepper candidates. The Thai chiles looked promising, until I saw a package of five-alarm-looking peppers just screaming for my attention.

I picked it up. They were bulgy-ass, fire-red habanero peppers. I looked up how many Scoville units habaneros can get up to, and they can range from anywhere between 100,000 to 300,000 Scoville units. Now we’re talking. I checked out and headed home with them.

Move aside, jalapeños, habanero poppers are headed to town, and these bholes won’t know what hit them.