It is a common knowledge that almost anything edible taste better with cheese. We, minus the lactose intolerant, just love cheese. We can’t seem to get enough it. That salty yet savory taste always entices us to go extra – extra cheese on pizzas, breads, pastas, hotdogs, tacos and certainly a lot more. This curd of milk is one of the most sought after ingredients of almost any trendy culinary contraptions. Take the case of the pepper jack cheese, an amalgamation of cheese and spices that make people go bananas in a good way. But what if the pepper cheese has the Bhut Jolokia, the second hottest chili on earth, as a side ingredient? Would these people still dare go for it and order an extra layer?
BhutJolokia, typically called the ghost pepper, steams with over one million Scoville units (units used to measure the hotness of a chili pepper) - 500 times hotter than your usual Tabasco. Furthermore, this ghost pepper is so hot that peoplein northeastern India smear a bunch on fences or incorporate them in smoke bombs as a safety precaution to keep wild elephants at a distance.
Originally grown and cultivated in India, ghost pepper is wreaking quite a stir in the western market because of its scorching spiciness. Although fresh pepper pods are still quite rare, Americans and Europeans have the dried and ground form to avail of and use for whatever fitting purpose they may have.
In Indian and Mediterranean restaurants, not only have the people started to acquire a liking for it, they have also picked up habitual nibbling of the ghost pepper cheese. They have grown a strange fondness for that belly-ripping experience only an intense heatliken to 500 raw chili peppers on a pressed dairy can bring. Although dairy products are meant to reduce hotness in the mouth, this cheese is completely cloaked by the hotness of the ghost pepper - a contradiction of heavenly taste.
Ghost pepper cheese is now widely used as bar snacks with crackers or biscuits, and any paying customer who eats any of these is sure to order a barrel of beer or any liquid afterwards. In some online specialty stores, there are blocks of home-made ghost pepper cheeses for sale, but because cheeses are hard to transport (because of the controlled temperature and humidity involved), they are pretty pricey. A simple recipe involving cheese and ghost peppers would be the Jolokia dip, which consists of ranch dressing, cream cheese and ghost pepper hot sauce.
If you chance upon a ghost pepper cheese, hold off before taking it. But for those who want it interesting, go ahead and enjoy a death-defying bite of the ghost pepper cheese!