One chip challenge. I’ve been hearing about this for a year – I’ve seen the videos online, I’ve seen the news reporter throwing up, and other people crying and drooling and snot running out of noses..  So naturally I went ahead and bought a couple for me and my buddy Chris to try.

People probably know the Paqui chip challenge by now – the hottest chip on the planet, made with the dust of carolina reapers, yadda yadda.

If you’ve watched more than 5 videos, you’ve had the entire package read to at some point, so I’m not going to go into details, but here is the packaging:

Back of the box:

Inside the box (chip pulled out)

Foil pouch containing on chip:

Inside cover :

I ate the chip and honestly was grossly disappointed with how hot it was. I have eaten a Carolina Reaper before, and was expecting heat on that scale. I was expecting my head to spin with the fury associated with a Carolina reaper burn. For those of you that don’t know, I ate a Carolina Reaper on an empty stomach one time, and lost my mind. I held water in my mouth to try and cool things off, but the burn was so intense that the water felt like it was immediately heating up to almost boiling temps in my mouth. It took a solid 15 minutes for the burn to go away, and shortly after that, my stomach started to act up. My brain started to come up with all sorts of insane thoughts of this pepper wrecking my entire gastro-intestinal tract – and I eventually threw the pepper up.

So you can see why I was nervous to try these, especially after seeing people online who I would consider pros at this game – shrink down to blobbering messes.

I really had no trouble with the chip, it was hot, but no hotter than the ghost pepper powder from trader joes that I put on virtually everything I ate for a solid month. Maybe my training with that stuff paid off. I don’t know..  These chips burned, but it was manageable.  Don’t believe the hype.

After eating the chip, I helped my buddy bottle his cider!

He uses these sweet ass grolsch bottles:

Racked it into a bottling bucket and added some sugar for carbination.

Yummy:

Look at that bottle: that’s a celebratory bottle for sure!

Look at that haul! pretty darn good!

Later that evening, we went out for a friend’s birthday party to Texas de Brazil!

Had some cocktails! Both were way too sweet. I actually didn’t finish mine.

A pro tip to dining at a place like this, is to use your trip to the salad bar to get items that you would enjoy as a topping on the meat you might receive. Sauteed mushrooms, hot peppers, marinated this and thats..  that’s key to enjoying this experience to the full. Here’s my ‘Salad’.  you can see it doesn’t resemble salad at all.

And let’s not forget the lobster bisque – one of the richest, saltiest soups you can have:

Now this is the kind of ‘going green’ that I can get behind:

The goucho’s didn’t disappoint! Picaña for everyone!!!

 

I wish I could say that I didn’t get the meat sweats during this meal, but I did.

I wish I could also say that I went home and went right to bed like I wished I could have, but that is also not the case – I ended up staying out til almost 3am – continuing to over-indulge in alcohol and food. I am embarrassed. I hope my diet crew doesn’t know about this day..  but they probably do.