How do szechuan cooks get this to be so numbingly spicy...

How do szechuan cooks get this to be so numbingly spicy? I have the peppers for the oil and fresh peppercorns and I just can't seem to get it to do the same thing. Every time I go out and eat this I'm on fire and delirious from the peppercorn, but when I make it at home it just tastes like butthole.

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thewoksoflife.com/2015/08/how-to-make-chili-oil/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mala_sauce
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Thai hot chilies.

Szechuan pepper
It's not actually a pepper, or a chili pepper. It's something else, unrelated to either of them.

>Szechuan pepper
that

Yeah it also a fun ingredient to experiment with in stews and roasts and shit

Something to do with the ancient seasoned woks and how hot they get them.

Ma La. The Ma is the blast of chilies, often a combination of fresh, dried and pickled. The La is Sichuan peppercorns - they're berries from a type of prickly ash tree. They cause a numbing sensation. The alternating waves of burning and numbing sensations are a signature of Sichuan cuisine.

You don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

Ken Kenichi is my lord and saviour.

Basically this. Sechuan peppercorns are completely different than your ordinary peppercorns. Remember to toast them on a pan before crushing in mortar.

dog meat makes the heat more intense

Or just get the oil and use a dab of it

related question that i don't want to start a new thread for:

i have this big bag of extra hot chilli powder from india and sometimes when i use it the dish is crazy hot and sometimes it's only mild

it seems to be mostly unrelated to how much powder i use.. any idea why?

thewoksoflife.com/2015/08/how-to-make-chili-oil/
You mixed them up.

I've been using these just found out mine were expired :/
Shake the bag up and try again post results. You might just be adding them at different heat recipes or ones with more fat in them which can lower the effect a bit
I want to make this at home because I can't find it anywhere but I get the feeling that either way I'd be tempted to drink it and poison myself accidentally
I'm gonna make a new batch with some new stuff I just got.
I wasn't aware that all three were used I'll get some seeds grow my own and make a new thread when it's time.

Also in case anybody was wondering pig intestines don't smell very different from clean human ones.

>it seems to be mostly unrelated to how much powder i use.. any idea why?

Could be that the fat content of the meal is responsible. Capsaicin sticks to fat, so the more fat in a meal, the more dispersed the capsaicin will be, while the less, the more concentrated.

>fat content
this makes sense in retrospect and i think you're both right, thanks

by appropriating native american crops and culture

>You mixed them up.
That's fine. Don't give much of a fuck about Mandarin anyways. The only Chinese I bothered to learn any of was Cantonese, because that's the superior food culture. But the Ma La thing is legit, even if it wreaks havoc on your bowels.

If you like spicy chinese cooking, give Hunan restaurants a try. The food from that province is generally a lot spicier, except they don't use szechuan peppercorns.

wait, there are peppercorns that are 'hotter' than traditional pepper?

i need to try this szechuan thing

The Szechuan peppercorn is used as one half of the Chinese flavor "ma la," the other half being spicy peppers. It's not actually spicy on it's own, instead it numbs your mouth with a somewhat rare chemical. The mouth numbing the peppercorn provides makes spices stand out, which is why Szechuan and Hunan foods have that special spicy quality without just using very hot peppers.

If you're not replicating it in your dish, you probably need to use more of the Szechuan peppercorn than you're thinking. You also want to make sure the spice properly seeps into your dish. Depending on what you're doing you might want to toast them in a pan before adding them to your dish.

The Chinese make a sauce with these seeds and peppers, but honestly in my experience most of them just used Chili and Peppercorn in whatever dish they happened to be cooking. Wikipedia has a pretty good entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mala_sauce

If you want these peppercorns for yourself, go to a Chinese market and look for something like pic related.

Source: I spent half a year in China.

Well, they're not really 'hot' per se, it's just that create a tingling numbing sensation that compounds with real heat from the chilies.

I've only tried a couple of Szechuan-style dishes before and they were pretty uncomfortable. Maybe it's my American whiteness but I don't really understand the desire to make food taste that way. I like a bit of heat in my food and my wife is always telling me to tone down/omit using chili flakes and cayenne in stuff I cook, but making food feel that way in your mouth and stomach baffles me. It's like people who drink coffee at near-boiling temperatures.

Different people have different heat tolerance.

You obviously have a higher one than your wife since you enjoy chili flakes in your food but that's too hot for her. Likewise there are other people whose heat tolerance is higher than yours.