Today, Panda, Wooley, QC, and myself went to Firehouse Subs for lunch. The subs were tasty as usual, but the main purpose of this post is to document Panda’s special edition lunchtime testing of random hot sauces that were available at the establishment.
Normally, Panda expresses zero care, fear, or emotion when eating hot food. I’ve had hot wings before that were downright unbearable to me, but Panda licked them up as if they were candy. The kid is crazy. Anyhow, he happily jumped at the idea to try a few of Firehouse’s sauces out, and until the end, it was fairly uneventful.
Firehouse has about 30 or so sauces on display that are free to try, and they are all rated from 1-10 for heat. Panda started out with a few 6’s and 7’s, and as expected, he didn’t seem the least bit phased. Bored by these results, Wooley returned to the counter at an attempt to find something a bit more entertaining. A few minutes later, he returned with 4 sacues ranging from a 9 to a 10+++. We figured this might get a little better.
“Pure Poison” was the first contender, and checked in at a 9 on the hot scale. Panda applied a bit to his sandwich and didn’t seem the least bit bothered. Quickly becoming bored of it, he switched up to the higher scored sauces, and went with “Endorphin Rush”, a 10+ on the scale.
A generous portion was applied and again, there we no noticeable results. At this point, I was fairly convinced that Panda’s taste buds were straight up broken, and that nothing would ever get a response out of him. Not giving up yet, we got him to go up to “357 Mad Dog”, a 10+++ on the Firehouse scale.
After adding a bit of the sauce, I decided to read the bottle’s extreme warning labels to get a bit of an idea as to what he was getting into. It was fairly intense, and went into detail about not touching your eyes, and how you should warn people if you gave it as a gift. It was also the first one that mentioned it’s Scoville rating, which was 357,000 (the Scoville scale is a measure of the hotness of a pepper, and apparently things like Tabasco only come in at around 30,000).
One bit into this stuff and we instantly see that Panda was somewhat uncomfortable.
Wooley smelled the bottle and said he nearly wanted to throw up, so I can only imagine what Panda was going through. It didn’t seem like too much fun though.
A number of minutes went by, and the pain was still quite apparent. No amount of sweet tea seemed to ease the pain, and at this point, Panda decided to call it a day. We did go ahead and inspect the last contender, the innocent looking “Melinda’s”.
Apparently this stuff packed a Scoville rating of 577,000, so we can only imagine how bad it would have been. Hopefully we can talk Panda into eventually going back to try it, so check back in the near future to see if it happens.
