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Real Florida: So you think it's hot outside?
By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times Staff Writer
PINE ISLAND -- About the bravest guy on earth is Randy Wayne White. He's the author of those popular Doc Ford novels that take place in Southwest Florida. For years he also wrote a column for Outside magazine featuring one macho adventure after another. He boxed with an old Hemingway sparring partner, swam naked in ice-filled water in the Arctic, tangled with a professional wrestler, learned to drive a car at a CIA anti-terrorist school, trained with Navy Seals and once, somehow, got stabbed on a city street in Peru. So it was no accident that White came to mind when I began considering the possibility of doing something daring, something foolish or something both to celebrate the worst part of summer. I wondered if he'd be my companion in what should be a ritual for all Floridians fed up by the heat and humidity. Perhaps White might join me in thumbing our collective noses at another miserable 90 degree, mosquito-infested day on the west coast of Florida. Would he like to take a few hours off from writing his next novel, perchance risking the wrath of a heartless publisher who probably insists on strict deadlines and competent punctuation, and instead swill a couple of bottles of unspeakably hot pepper sauce, the kind that makes the eyes bulge and the ears smoke? "What a great idea," he said when I telephoned. "Come on down." One tough habanero
When the weather is this hot, civilized people hibernate in air-conditioned cocoons, backstroke through martini-clear springs or make tracks for the high mountains. On the other hand, eating hot sauce in August is something like visiting a sweat lodge in August. When you emerge from the experience, even 90 degrees feels good. I didn't have to explain the facts of life to White, long a Florida resident. At 52, he lives in the tiny community of Pineland on Lee County's sprawling Pine Island, a paradise of mango and avocado groves separated by forests of royal poinciana, gumbo limbo and wild tamarind trees. His old-timey-no-air-conditioning-house, on top of an ancient Indian mound, is a good spot to watch predatory snook ambush careless mullet in Pine Island Sound. Beyond the Darwinian exercise, floating like clouds on the horizon, are the tony islands of Captiva and Sanibel. Pineland is old Florida. Everybody knows everybody else. Sometimes folks knock on White's door to invite him fishin' or drinkin'. Because such invitations frequently are issued before breakfast, he's erected a sign asking for uninterrupted time to write. He grew up in North Carolina, worked as a telephone lineman, was a fishing guide for many years but secretly wanted to be Mark Twain. He finally got a chance to tell stories in the Fort Myers News-Press, started freelancing for national magazines and a dozen years ago wrote his first novel, Sanibel Flats, which featured his alter ego, Doc Ford. His ninth Doc Ford novel, Twelve Mile Limit, was published last spring to good reviews. He's working on the next, in which Doc will get to the bottom of some Seminole Indian funny business. Doc is a marine biologist with a mysterious past -- perhaps a past that includes the CIA. He's one of those tough guys with a heart of gold, like Travis McGee, the fictional character made famous by the late John D. McDonald, to whom White is often favorably compared. "Actually, Doc is tougher, smarter and more articulate than I am," White tells people. Doc probably would have more sense than to put really hot stuff -- habanero peppers, for example -- into his mouth. White likes it hot. For years, during his world travels, he collected pepper seeds and planted them in his garden. Walking through his yard, sampling peppers, he could relive trips to Australia, Asia and the American tropics. "I'm not really a chilihead," he said. "I don't like pain. But I like hot food." A chilihead is someone who likes peppers the hotter the better. For a chilihead, a jalapeno is a kindergartener's jelly bean. A true chilihead is not satisfied unless lips, tongue and throat are ablaze. How hot is hot?The Tampa Bay area has its share of chiliheads, of course. In the last decade or so, hot sauce has become hotter than the business end of an Ybor cigar. You can buy TNT-flavored stuff over the Internet and also at a scattering of shops. Truth is, many of the thermonuclear sauces are bought as novelty items and never consumed. Sauces with names such as DOA Cyanide, Acid Rain and Rigor Mortis are good conversation starters. On my way to White's, I had stopped at Fiery Foods Junction, a sauce shop on U.S. 41 between Palmetto and Bradenton in Manatee County and a gathering place for chiliheads. The store stocks about 600 brands of sauces. Some are so hot they are kept in boxes behind lock and key. "You wouldn't want to get anything on your hands," said John Frederick, who owns the store with his wife, Cindy, who happened to be reading -- I am not making this up -- a Doc Ford novel when I arrived. Pepper heat is measured by the Scoville scale, invented by chemist Wilbur Scoville in 1912. On the Scoville scale, a bell pepper rates a big fat zero. A jalapeno, and my lips burn at the thought, measures more than 2,500 Scovies. The hottest known pepper is the red savina habanero. It pushes the scale toward 850,000. Nobody in his right mind eats habaneros. Unless they're Randy Wayne White or a mild-mannered 30ish Manatee County deputy sheriff named Greg Meyer. I met Meyer in the store, which was the site last February of his latest triumph. For the third straight year, he won the store's chili-eating contest, devouring 14 habaneros. "Some people feel pretty bad the next day, but I didn't," Meyer bragged. He trains for the contest by eating his wife's cooking. It's a compliment. Stephanie, from New Mexico, likes to spice up her cuisine. "When you eat a habanero, we're not talking about a campfire in your mouth," Greg told me. "We're talking about the Towering Inferno." "I won't let him kiss me for two days," Stephanie said. "He'll burn my lips." "You have be very careful even handling them," Greg said. "You have to be extra, extra careful when you go to the bathroom. You don't want to touch something really sensitive." Changing the subject, I asked if there was an antidote to a hot mouth. "When I'm eating habaneros, I always keep a bottle of 2 percent milk on ice. Milk helps. Water is useless." The Fiery Food Junction stocks no milk but plenty of habanero sauces. I bought a couple of interesting bottles for White. I was too nervous to even touch "Mustard Gas," which comes in a metal container. Should I ever feel brave enough, I might be tempted one day by a bottle of something called "The Source." The inventor claims his sauce rates 7.1-million Scovies. Imagine. Burning a hole in your tongue, and then the floor, and then the earth below. The Source costs more than $100 a bottle.
The taste testSchool kids think Christopher Columbus merely discovered the Americas. White appreciates that Columbus also discovered chili peppers, brought them back to Spain and helped make hot food popular all over the world Today, hot peppers are credited with all kinds of magic, true and otherwise. Eating them can lower blood pressure and relieve depression, some claim. A few cultures believe they are aphrodisiacs. In 1987 White was jogging in Fiji when he encountered an anxious man who wanted to consult an American regarding matrimonial woes. The Fijian blamed his problem with premature ejaculation on a lust for hot peppers. White recommended that he ease up on the pepper eating. "Give up hot food?" the man asked. "For what, a woman?" White wrote about the incident in his Outside column, which is included in his latest collection of essays, Last Flight Out. In the essay, he talks about one of the greatest days in his life, the day he met Jorge Araujo in Cartagena, Colombia. Jorge was in the hot sauce business. Then, a miracle: an accidental cross-pollination that produced a new variety of pepper with a wonderful smell and color. Jorge called it "the Amazona," and White sells the brew these days under the "Doc Ford" label over the Internet. Check it out at www.docford.com. As I looked around White's house, a marvel of tropical memorabilia and baseball souvenirs, dirty dishes and -- I refuse to describe his bathroom except to explain he's a bachelor -- he got on the phone and invited pals to a pepper-sauce tasting. Late in the afternoon we gathered in the "Doc Ford Bar" of the nearby Tarpon Lodge. Among the courageous was fishing guide Craig Skaar. "I've done the hot sauce tasting," he said. "I never stop sweating. I've also done the rum tasting. I think the hot sauce tasting is probably safer." We ordered a heaping plate of quesadillas. I produced a couple of bottles of hot sauce, including "Colon Cleaner" and "Scorned Woman." In the dim light, we began our task. Right away I was intimidated. As I trickled drops on my food, White poured it on. A few atoms of something red called "Hemorrhoid Helper," featuring habaneros, almost put me on the floor. White read the label. "Says here, burns both ways. Nice advertisement." He gulped some down without undue sweating. "A little strong. Hot, but not enough real flavor." His own sauces? I loved 'em, even the one with habanero peppers that cleared my sinuses and made the rest of my nose look like a certain Christmas reindeer's. Nobody had remembered to bring milk. Someone did bring a birthday cake. I'm not lying. Whose birthday? I don't know. The pepper sauce had gone to my head. Was I hallucinating? Or was White pouring hot sauce on his slice of vanilla cake? He was. "Try some," he ordered. Looking at his gumbo limbo arms and shaved head, I obeyed.
The aftermathMy memories are a little hazy as to what happened next. I am pretty sure White disappeared momentarily and went home to adjust his stereo to its loudest setting. I am relatively confident we met a little while later on a dock to watch the sunset. I have a vague memory of watching clouds the color of yellow and red hot sauce mixed together. Our soundtrack, coming from White's blasting stereo a half a block away, I swear on my mother's good name, was opera. Yes, Pineland residents, Andre Bocelli was singing Canta Della Terra with all his heart. "My favorite music for sunsets," I am sure White grunted. Over the music, I am certain, I heard another kind of opera, a low grumbling, a basso prufundo of sorts that sounded like a Gregorian chant but certainly wasn't. As White once informed an emergency room physician in a revolution-plagued country: Calmese. No son balazos, es el estomago. ("Relax! That is not gunfire, that is my stomach.")
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From the Times Taste section From the features wire |
