Morning Show Does Munchies 420 Cafe Fire In The Hole Wing Challenge: Scott Finds A Boo-Boo
Morning Show Does Munchies 420 Cafe Fire In The Hole Wing Challenge: Scott Finds A Boo-Boo:Here’s one I heard about this morning from my wife. She was listening to a St. Louis crap morning radio show. It’s the dreadful MJ Morning Show, which is technically based out of Tampa and is syndicated in other Florida towns, in addition to the St. Louis metro area. Anyway, she text messaged me that on this morning’s show they were partaking in the Fire in Your Hole wing challenge which Adam Richman of Man v. Food had recently taken on (and will be aired on the Travel Channel later in September). She also mentioned that the challenge is using a sauce based on the ghost chile pepper, which chileheads know better as the naga/bhut jolokia pepper. Sounded interesting, but I was unable to listen to the radio segment on my iPhone in time.
One item that was of particular interest to both my wife and me was that while listening, she heard the owner of the eating establishment hosting the wing-eating challenge, Munchies 420 Cafe in Sarasota, FL, claim that the sauce was hotter than 20 million Scoville Heat Units. Now she is not into hot peppers and spicy foods at all, but after listening to me talk about the heat in sauces and chiles over the years, even she knew the extreme heat claim sounded a little fishy. Of course, everyone with even the smallest knowledge of capsaicin knows that the top limit of the Scoville Scale is Scoville Scale, and it’s near impossible to create a pure extract that high, let alone 20 million.
Anyway, the MJ Morning Show had a couple of members of their crew, Meredith and Dilbret the intern, take on the challenge. Adam Richman supposedly was only able to consume 2 1/2 of these hot wings:
After reflecting on it, I decided to look into the 20 million SHU claim to see if my lovely wife’s ears were playing tricks on her or not. I struggled to make sense of Munchies’ website (http://www.munchies420cafe.com) and I had failed to come across any heat claims of the challenge. I called the cafe. A polite man named Carl answered and I asked a few questions of him, including the details of this “Fire in the Hole” contest. He did confirm what my wife had heard, and stated that the sauce used in the extreme wings contained naga jolokia peppers, plus a pepper they “had not really done testing on” which was around 20 million Scoville units. If not for my mild irritation at the bogus boast, I would have laughed.
Thanks to the magic of the internet, I had discovered the radio program’s podcast containing the erroneous heat claim. While he mentioned nothing of some unknown mystery chile pepper as eluded to by Carl that was hotter than the naga jolokia, Munchies 420 owner JD stated that it was an extract from the jolokias that gave the sauce its extreme heat. When inquired about the extract’s heat level, JD replied with “they haven’t really tested it yet, but it’s DEFINITELY OVER 20 million [emphasis mine].” Oops.
Here is the link to the podcast segment containing the heat discussion: 08/26/09 Segment #6. The discussion on heat was brought up around 6:36 into the mp3 file, and the particular claim at 7:21. If the podcast is taken down by the time you read this, you can download it here.
I’m not trying to rake JD over the coals on this matter; after all, he could be innocently parroting what the maker or supplier of the pepper extract had told him. But when the cafe employees start propagating the claim, then someone should raise a flag.
I hope that when the Man V. Food episode is aired, they will have already done their research and know that Munchies’ claim is false. After all, they presented correct Scoville Heat Unit levels of the peppers contained in the episode featuring Chunky’s Burgers’ Four Horsemen Burger, so hopefully they did likewise with this.
Source:http://www.scottrobertsweb.com/Munchies-420-Cafe-Fire-in-Your-Hole-Wing-Challenge-Man-V-Food
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