{mosimage}I’d like to begin this week’s column by pointing out that while I enjoy a certain level of heat in my food, I’m not a chilehead, not a real one anyway. A roasted habanero is delicious in its place, and I enjoy the more emphatic aspects of Thai cooking, but I’m not fond of the kind of extreme sauces whose labels brag about the level of harm the contents may wreak on its fans’ gastro­intestinal systems, and I’ve never thrown a red savina chile into a stir-fry just for fun. The idea of Pure Cap, a concentrated extract of capsaicin, the chemical that makes chiles hot, is frightening. I have fallen — once — for the gag of eating a chip loaded with a quarter bottle of Dave’s Insanity Sauce, and I am here to report that it hurt, a lot. I don’t know about you, but I am persuaded that a condiment powerful enough to temporarily blind its consumers is probably a condiment... More >>>