If you've read any of my articles before you know we have spent a lot of time on capsaicin, what it does for hot sauce and what it does to your body.
I thought we'd take a break from capsaicin and talk about my second favorite spice - Horseradish!
The burn of capsaicin travels down your tongue, your throat, into your stomach, and eventually neutralized by your stomach acids. Conversely, horseradish goes up into the nasal passages. If you've ever eaten at a sushi restaurant and put a little too much wasabi on your dragon roll, you know what I'm talking about!
A little known fact - wasabi is difficult to cultivate because it grows along stream beds and river valleys. Because of this, wasabi is extremely expensive - about eighty dollars per pound! Unless you are in a very high end sushi restaurant, the "wasabi" you get is commonly a mixture of horseradish, starch, and green food coloring.
Horseradish is in the same family as mustard, wasabi, and surprisingly broccoli and cabbage. Horseradish is a green plant that grows to roughly four feet, flowers like any other vegetable plant, and is native to southeastern Europe and Western Asia. The section of the plant that horseradish comes from is the root, not the top flowering section that usually morphs into a vegetable similar pepper plants.
Have you ever wondered why the burn feels different between capsaicin and horseradish?
Commercial horseradish is sliced or shredded into a paste that is spreadable on sandwiches or mixed into another sauce. The process of slicing or shredding the horseradish root breaks the cell walls down and exposes a compound called allyl isothiocyanate.
Interestingly, capsaicin is a defense mechanism to keep the pepper plant mostly intact. Except for birds, once an animal eats a pepper they will not continue eating the remainder of the peppers on the plant. Humans are different in that respect - once bitten, the burn from capsaicin seems to be almost addictive. Allyl isothiocyanate does the exact same thing as capsaicin. If you've sat in that sushi house you will know the effects of ingesting allyl will irritate the mucous membrane in your sinuses on up to your eyes.
Here's a tip - if you find yourself playing with a horseradish plant, blend your slices or mash with vinegar soon after you process the root. When exposed to heat or oxygen, the allyl will darken, lose its tanginess, and will taste unpleasant to say the least.
Give some horseradish a try and let us know what you come up with, or give the recipes below a taste. Personally, we'll be trying some combinations of Hot Sauce and Horseradish to get the complete burn!
Pete Legrady
Proprietor
Peppers of Key West
