Why are these so spicy?!? Research I’ve done says that they are like a couple of tens of thousand scoville, but I’ve had dishes and snacks with millions of scoville that are easier to eat
Why are these so spicy?!? Research I’ve done says that they are like a couple of tens of thousand scoville, but I’ve had dishes and snacks with millions of scoville that are easier to eat
by WhoAmIEven2
28 Comments
mriabtsev
I found these burned me horribly all over my face, which was super unpleasant… then I discovered I wasn’t supposed to make them like ramen, lol. Is it possible you’ve made the same error? Without the broth splashing into my nose and shit I found it much more tolerable
LettuceEmotional6142
Because you’re basically eating straight sauce with some noodles. I wouldn’t say these are super spicy, say you took a dab of the sauce and then compared it to a dab of Tabasco, they’re around the same spice level. You’re just having so much at once, it feels much much spicier.
With hotter things you don’t exactly put anywhere as much as you would with these noodles, so that could be an explanation. Technically hotter, but less of it so it’s not as bad.
Affectionate_Load459
Because you haven’t had dishes and snacks with millions of shu and I doubt buldak 2x has the same rating as a serrano pepper, if it’s even possible to measure shu of noodles with sauce. It’s all made up numbers
PepperTheBirb
Because unless you’re eating raw peppers or straight extract, scoville numbers are basically meaningless and almost never anywhere near as high as advertised.
spacechimp
I’m convinced it is because of the oils in the sauce. Capsaicin is fat-soluble, and the oils help the sauce coat pain receptors better.
liveonguitar
It’s the last ingredient on the listing, the capsicum oleoresin
redraz0r
You have not had anything with millions of scoville. Maybe they were made with some, but its heavily diluted if you think this is hot
Ancient_Solution_420
My guess would be the amount you get in your mouth. You can also buy the sauce in bottles if you want to try it on anything else.
Aggravating-Bug1769
The heat is from the type of chilli that they use, it’s not like the flavour and heat from jalapeno or habanero. They use a combination of chili pepper extract and paprika extract and because it’s a capsaicin concentration it has more heat than flavour and you get that chemical taste that comes with extract . The base flavour in the sauce is more from the soy sauce and sesame oil than the chilli peppers.
Miserable-Plenty1964
I don’t find it very spicy on the tongue but I sweat like I’m working in an attic when it’s 100 degrees outside lol something about it. But it’s sooo good
Disco_Knightly
It’s extract, it always hits different than natural peppers. Same deal with Da Bomb.
GonzoI
You have never had a dish or snack with “millions of scoville”. You’ve had dishes and snacks ***with an INGREDIENT*** that averaged in the 1-2 million SHU range, but it was diluted by the rest of the product down to something far lower. 1 million SHU means there is 1 gram of calculated capsaicin-equivalent per 16 grams of total mass. If you add 16 grams of 1 million SHU pepper into a product and the end result is 16 kg of some kind of snack, then the resulting product is 1,000 SHU.
Unfortunately, the laws on dishonest marketing don’t really apply to food very well. If you put 1 gram of ghost pepper in 100 tons of product, you can label it as “1 million scoville” even though it’s really only 0.0625 SHU.
To be clear, there are products out there that are greater than 1 million SHU, but they are all either raw peppers, “sauces” with chemical extract, or pure chemical extract. If regular Buldak seems spicy to you, you want to stay far away from those extracts.
_MrShakedown_
It has capsaicin extract
Golemfrost
Eat them when they’re cooled down, instantly less spicy imo.
duskapproaches
They hurt more going out than in 😔❤️🩹
SaXaCaV
They aren’t all that spicy, especially in the grand scheme of things. Your tolerance is just a lot lower than you are assuming. I dont think you have eaten anything close to a million SHU, let alone in the millions.
korc
I might be wrong here but I suspect they are so spicy because Scoville units are are calculated on dry weight, and buldak is counting the entire dry package. In that case using some math:
1 habanero is 9 g. Let’s say it’s really spicy and is 350k shu (upper end of the Wikipedia scale). Its dry weight I’ll estimate at 0.9 g or 900 mg. Ppm of capsaicin is determined by dividing shu by 16 per Wikipedia. Therefore the ppm of capsaicin in a dried hot habanero is 21875 or about 2% w/w. Therefore the total content of capsaicin in the pepper is ~20 mg.
A package of Buldak 2x is 140 g and 10000 shu. That’s about 0.06% capsaicin. 0.06% of 140 g is ~88 mg.
So if I am correct, the total capsaicin content of a buldak package amounts to eating several pretty hot habaneros – or to put it another way in the range of a ghost pepper.
Feel free to correct any assumptions
foxmaster9000
I LOVE buldak! Eat it all the time
MidnighT0k3r
No way it’s not a lie.
This shit is hotter than any habeneros I’ve ever eaten, from the mild ones to the chocolate and red savana.
There is no way in hell the one I ate last week was less than 500,000 shu
SSJChugDude
I think form factor and people labeling other sauces incorrectly.
Form Factor – it’s an oily substance distributed in hot water. I can eat a Habanero raw and be fine, but if I blend the habanero into a paste and heat it up in a soup, the heat seems to hit way harder imo.
Some Snacks and sauces are just misunderstood or mislabeled. Such as The Last Dab. The show advertises it as several million SHU. What they really mean is that it has ingredients IN it that scale that high. Not the sauce itself. A lot of sauces do this.
There’s been some sauces that advertise in the millions of SHUs but if you read the fine print they’re actually spiked with an extract that reflects that and not the sauce itself.
It could be a combination of this for you.
I’ve had 2X and 3X spicy Buldak, but it still doesn’t come close to eating a blended Tabasco peppers. Hello, a bowl full of Tabasco would be pretty hot by the time you’re done drinking/eating it.
Sowf_Paw
Because the scoville scale, at least as it is used currently, is bullshit.
Intelligent-Bird8254
I don’t eat a lot of spicy foods…. But back when these went viral I tried them and man oh man did I really mess up 🤣 tears were flowing and I was drenched in sweat, clutching my stomach and on the toilet with a cold rag to cool off my butt 🤣
monkeymetroid
They aren’t that spicy (spicy is subjective this will get nowhere with me)
TCristatus
You haven’t had dishes with millions of scovilles. You’ve had dishes made with ingredients that are that hot but unless you are eating a big bowl of mashed up reapers the whole bowl is whatever it is, probably lower than the Buldak.
Myron896
Salt makes a difference as well. High sodium makes the pepper more intense
jerdle_reddit
You’ve had dishes and snacks that use a pepper with millions of SHU.
These are an entire bowl of 10k SHU.
If you ate an entire bowl of serrano powder, that’d be pretty damn hot.
TroutKlout2755
Nasty. Extract. Burns.
chilli_enema_detox
Because they use chilli extract, which hangs around for longer.
28 Comments
I found these burned me horribly all over my face, which was super unpleasant… then I discovered I wasn’t supposed to make them like ramen, lol. Is it possible you’ve made the same error? Without the broth splashing into my nose and shit I found it much more tolerable
Because you’re basically eating straight sauce with some noodles. I wouldn’t say these are super spicy, say you took a dab of the sauce and then compared it to a dab of Tabasco, they’re around the same spice level. You’re just having so much at once, it feels much much spicier.
With hotter things you don’t exactly put anywhere as much as you would with these noodles, so that could be an explanation. Technically hotter, but less of it so it’s not as bad.
Because you haven’t had dishes and snacks with millions of shu and I doubt buldak 2x has the same rating as a serrano pepper, if it’s even possible to measure shu of noodles with sauce. It’s all made up numbers
Because unless you’re eating raw peppers or straight extract, scoville numbers are basically meaningless and almost never anywhere near as high as advertised.
I’m convinced it is because of the oils in the sauce. Capsaicin is fat-soluble, and the oils help the sauce coat pain receptors better.
It’s the last ingredient on the listing, the capsicum oleoresin
You have not had anything with millions of scoville. Maybe they were made with some, but its heavily diluted if you think this is hot
My guess would be the amount you get in your mouth. You can also buy the sauce in bottles if you want to try it on anything else.
The heat is from the type of chilli that they use, it’s not like the flavour and heat from jalapeno or habanero. They use a combination of chili pepper extract and paprika extract and because it’s a capsaicin concentration it has more heat than flavour and you get that chemical taste that comes with extract . The base flavour in the sauce is more from the soy sauce and sesame oil than the chilli peppers.
I don’t find it very spicy on the tongue but I sweat like I’m working in an attic when it’s 100 degrees outside lol something about it. But it’s sooo good
It’s extract, it always hits different than natural peppers. Same deal with Da Bomb.
You have never had a dish or snack with “millions of scoville”. You’ve had dishes and snacks ***with an INGREDIENT*** that averaged in the 1-2 million SHU range, but it was diluted by the rest of the product down to something far lower. 1 million SHU means there is 1 gram of calculated capsaicin-equivalent per 16 grams of total mass. If you add 16 grams of 1 million SHU pepper into a product and the end result is 16 kg of some kind of snack, then the resulting product is 1,000 SHU.
Unfortunately, the laws on dishonest marketing don’t really apply to food very well. If you put 1 gram of ghost pepper in 100 tons of product, you can label it as “1 million scoville” even though it’s really only 0.0625 SHU.
To be clear, there are products out there that are greater than 1 million SHU, but they are all either raw peppers, “sauces” with chemical extract, or pure chemical extract. If regular Buldak seems spicy to you, you want to stay far away from those extracts.
It has capsaicin extract
Eat them when they’re cooled down, instantly less spicy imo.
They hurt more going out than in 😔❤️🩹
They aren’t all that spicy, especially in the grand scheme of things. Your tolerance is just a lot lower than you are assuming. I dont think you have eaten anything close to a million SHU, let alone in the millions.
I might be wrong here but I suspect they are so spicy because Scoville units are are calculated on dry weight, and buldak is counting the entire dry package. In that case using some math:
1 habanero is 9 g. Let’s say it’s really spicy and is 350k shu (upper end of the Wikipedia scale). Its dry weight I’ll estimate at 0.9 g or 900 mg. Ppm of capsaicin is determined by dividing shu by 16 per Wikipedia. Therefore the ppm of capsaicin in a dried hot habanero is 21875 or about 2% w/w. Therefore the total content of capsaicin in the pepper is ~20 mg.
A package of Buldak 2x is 140 g and 10000 shu. That’s about 0.06% capsaicin. 0.06% of 140 g is ~88 mg.
So if I am correct, the total capsaicin content of a buldak package amounts to eating several pretty hot habaneros – or to put it another way in the range of a ghost pepper.
Feel free to correct any assumptions
I LOVE buldak! Eat it all the time
No way it’s not a lie.
This shit is hotter than any habeneros I’ve ever eaten, from the mild ones to the chocolate and red savana.
There is no way in hell the one I ate last week was less than 500,000 shu
I think form factor and people labeling other sauces incorrectly.
Form Factor – it’s an oily substance distributed in hot water. I can eat a Habanero raw and be fine, but if I blend the habanero into a paste and heat it up in a soup, the heat seems to hit way harder imo.
Some Snacks and sauces are just misunderstood or mislabeled. Such as The Last Dab. The show advertises it as several million SHU. What they really mean is that it has ingredients IN it that scale that high. Not the sauce itself. A lot of sauces do this.
There’s been some sauces that advertise in the millions of SHUs but if you read the fine print they’re actually spiked with an extract that reflects that and not the sauce itself.
It could be a combination of this for you.
I’ve had 2X and 3X spicy Buldak, but it still doesn’t come close to eating a blended Tabasco peppers. Hello, a bowl full of Tabasco would be pretty hot by the time you’re done drinking/eating it.
Because the scoville scale, at least as it is used currently, is bullshit.
I don’t eat a lot of spicy foods…. But back when these went viral I tried them and man oh man did I really mess up 🤣 tears were flowing and I was drenched in sweat, clutching my stomach and on the toilet with a cold rag to cool off my butt 🤣
They aren’t that spicy (spicy is subjective this will get nowhere with me)
You haven’t had dishes with millions of scovilles. You’ve had dishes made with ingredients that are that hot but unless you are eating a big bowl of mashed up reapers the whole bowl is whatever it is, probably lower than the Buldak.
Salt makes a difference as well. High sodium makes the pepper more intense
You’ve had dishes and snacks that use a pepper with millions of SHU.
These are an entire bowl of 10k SHU.
If you ate an entire bowl of serrano powder, that’d be pretty damn hot.
Nasty. Extract. Burns.
Because they use chilli extract, which hangs around for longer.