Mouths have it rough. Not only do they have to take on the terrifying tastes of cafeteria food and your parents’ adventurous forays into cooking when you’re a kid, but they take even more abuse as you grow older and stuff everything from Cheetos chicken fries to taco shells made out of poultry (hey, chicken is healthier than red meat!) right past your lips and into the fleshy embrace of your tongue and jowls. And since we make especially terrible decisions when it comes to eating spicy foods, the company behind the new Carolina Reaper Madness tortilla chip has decided to stand in as your en loco chipentis and package its newest offering in single servings.
“Oh, that’s just an advertising stunt,” you may be saying to yourself right now, and you know what? You’re probably half-right. But at $4.99 a chip, Paqui (the company behind the product) must have some reason besides the novelty to charge that much. And according to Mashable they have several good reasons. The first is the fact that the chip “gets its kick” from the Carolina Reaper pepper variety that’s in the Guinness Book of World Records. The second is, well….
Paqui and Chef Smokin’ Ed Currie worked together for several months to create the perfect spicy seasoning for the chip. To make it worse, the Carolina Reaper pepper is joined by ghost peppers and chipotle seasoning. Currie claims it’s shockingly spicy.
You want to see shockingly spicy? Check out this video — posted only a week ago — of two women trying Carolina Reaper peppers.
Now imagine the heat of both the ghost pepper and the chipotle. You already need a drink right? Just make sure it’s not water, because that spreads the heat around. If you’re going to try this thing, just have a milkshake ready (the combination of milk and ice cream is more soothing than milk alone) and know that it’s probably going to take you more than one bite to get through the thing, especially because even the chip’s creator says it’s not designed to “make you reach back into the bag for more.” So…it’s the anti-Dorito.
Of course, that just means you’ll see YouTube clips of people trying to eat 10 in a row soon. For now, you can check out these videos of people trying one chip at a time and still having a life-changing experience. Who knows, eating this chip may be a little like 10 years of therapy? (Well, at least if all the crying you’ll be doing is any indication.)
