Britain’s hottest curries – tested

It’s National Curry Week. To celebrate, author and food enthusiast, Sam Jordison, decided to put his curry where his mouth is.

There are said to be two rivals for the title of world’s hottest curry: The Bombay Burner from The Cinnamon Club in London and the infamous Curry Hell from the Curry Capital in Newcastle. I wanted to try both and, as a kind of control, I also thought I should try to come up with my own.

I took on the homemade curry first. I should admit that I mainly chose the recipe because it looked really easy. It was just a basic mix of chilli, chicken, garlic and vinegar, made all the more appealing by the command to wash it down with two pints of lager.

But the actual chilli spices I found looked serious. These were the wonderfully named Satan’s Ashes from the Chilli Pepper Company in Cumbria. Affidavits on their website spoke of near hallucinatory meetings with the devil himself.

None of that happened to me, but then, I did only manage three mouthfuls. The stuff had already brought tears to my eyes as I cooked it. The experience of eating it was, at that stage, the most painful thing that food had done to me. Had someone let off a blowtorch in my mouth it couldn’t have felt worse.

But what did feel worse was the second contender: The Bombay Burner.

Inspired by traditional food from Hyderabad, this lethal dish is a mixture of lamb mince and Naga chillies. These latter are – according to the Scoville scale – about 100 times hotter than jalepenos. Which is about 1,000 times hotter than I fancied eating. Especially when the head chef on the day started telling me stories about what had happened to other foolhardy diners. Everyone claimed it was the hottest thing they’d tasted. And pretty much everyone failed to eat more than a couple of mouthfuls. When one party of young men goaded each other into finishing their portions it literally ended in tears. One left the restaurant in an ambulance. By the time I’d signed a legal disclaimer stating I was aware of the risks involved, I was distinctly uncomfortable.

The feeling wasn’t helped when the Burner itself arrived. Within seconds, I was in agony. It wasn’t just hot. It was like being stabbed with a thousand knives. Like Bambi declaring at the end of the film that he’s just caught the plague and all the little woodland creatures are going to get it too.

Luckily, soon, I was subject to an extraordinary head-rush. My synapses were flooded with endorphins. My heart was pounding. I began to feel light-headed and pretty great in a couldn’t-possibly-drive-a car-kind of way.

So I ate some more. Now I hardly felt it. That was even more worrying. I decided it was probably best I stopped.

I’ve since learned that extremely hot chillis have a powerful effect on the pain receptors in your mouth. They apparently over-stimulate them so much that your brain stops taking signals from them and they are temporarily unable to tell it when something is going wrong. So it was probably just as well I ate no more. Especially considering what happened to me when I went to relieve myself the following morning…

Impressive as the Bombay Burner was, I was still afraid that its main rival might beat it. Curry Hell was invented in 1977, and was for years apparently known as the world’s hottest meal. And while a few of the staff at The Cinnamon Club had actually tried the Bombay Burner, when I spoke to the Curry Capital’s current manager he told me he would never sample Curry Hell. “I’ve seen what goes in it. And I’ve seen too many people in pain,” he told me.

Until then I had been feeling pleased with myself for tracking the thing down. When I’d first learned that the other claimant was in Newcastle, I’d thought I would never be able to get any. Then I’d spotted that Curry Capital also hold the World Record for the furthest takeaway delivery: they once flew one over to a homesick Geordie in Sydney. Compared to that my home in Norwich would be no problem.

Except, fortunately for me, it never arrived. Whether lost in the vagaries of the postal system or impounded because of its toxic qualities, Curry Hell didn’t reach my door. I was left unable to judge with authority what the world’s hottest curry may be. But mighty relieved.

Think you know of a hotter curry? Tell us in the user comments below.

Try cooking some of your own hell-raisers with 4Food’s curry recipes.

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