Hot sauce, hmmm. here's my story of pain.
i had the misfortune of trying some of Dave's Ultimate Insanity Sauce
http://www.firegirl.com/hs1125ui.html a few years ago, and i have to say it will be burned into my brain forever.
we like to take a cup of ranch and put hot sauce on top of it then send the fried crawfish to the bottom of it all. on most nights we use a nice Louisiana or Texas Pete hot sauce, but as sometimes happens we were feeling adventurous. i went to the wall of hot sauces the restaurant has and picked the one that said "World's hottest sauce" somewhere on it and of course, didnt believe them.
a good sample might have involved a toothpick or the tip of my fork, but that's not the way real men do it.
real men plunge their sauce absorber (fried crawfish) completely in it and straight onto the tongue.
there are some memories that people remember for a long time and that night was one of them. after the 0.000012 seconds that stuff was on my tongue my body went into "Self-Preservation Mode" and spit everything out of my mouth with as much gusto as humanly possible. of course along with the hot sauce and ranch was a fried tail that left at a speed akin to Mach 3 and my hands, atempting to stop the ensuing mess, reached up to cover the spray and was a perfect deflector of everything except the fried tail. as the sauce hit my hands and was turned directly onto my face, i realized that this whole sequence was going to be very bad. for a moment everything stopped and everyone was staring at me (probably because i had screamed and shot a fried tail across the table). just as we bagan to laugh, the pain set in pretty hard. the pain was not just on my tongue but all over my face where the hot sauce had been so evenly spread including in my eyes. i ran to the bathroom to wash my face off and by the time i got halfway there i couldnt see much through the tears and had to feel my way into the bathroom. after the first wiping i looked in the mirror and there were these blood-red wheps all over my cheeks and forehead. about this time some guy came in. when i turned around, with water streaming from my face and these bright red spots, he decided he would use the bathroom later.
after about 15 minutes of pain, everything started to come back to normal. when i could read again, i looked at the bottle. It had a warning on the back for heart patients, pregnant women, etc which i thought was pretty funny and the directions said to only use it in chili or "in dillusions of 40:1 or greater".
after this experience, i have been very satisfied with a moderate hot sauce and no longer play the pain game.
Life Lesson: use a toothpick first.
