The Most Extreme Versions Of Already-Awesome Food
by Ian Fortey
Hey, you. You have a food chasm, right? Most of us do, and any good rogue needs to fuel the beast by jamming that sucker full of delicious calories on a semi-routine basis, because nothing gets done when you only eat rice cakes and tepid water. Being who we are, we wanted to find out what food tips the scales as the best of the best, the most of the most, the extreme reaches of all things gastronomical. And we're still not sure if that's a good or bad thing to know. But we're going to share it, anyway.
Hottest Hot Sauce
The internet loves hot sauce almost as much as it loves watching someone else eat it. Especially if it's the kind that's so fiery, their body rejects their own soul. Eyes watering, brow sweating, nose running ... the kind of hot sauce that exists not as a compliment to food but as a dare from God.
When you're picking out hot sauces, there's some difficulty in determining just what you're looking for. That's because there are actually two different products you can run afoul of at the baffling end of the Scoville scale (the scientific units used to measure how long this hot sauce is going to cripple you in the bathroom). One is a sauce and another is an extract, which can essentially be pure capsaicin, the chemical in peppers that makes them hot. You don't want an extract -- that's cheating and also insane. You want sauce.
HotSauce.com
It doesn't count if it came directly out of Satan's bladder.
Taco Bell Fire Sauce is about 500 Scoville Heat Units (SHU). Sriracha is 2200. Thai chili peppers can range from 50,000 to 100,000. An extract can reach 16,000,000 SHU in its purest form. You're not even supposed to eat that stuff; it can technically be used as a weapon. It's meant to be added, sparingly, to a larger batch of food. But when it comes to sauce -- legit sauce -- one of the hottest things you can put in your suckhole is Hell Unleashed, which clocks in at over 5.3 million SHU. That's worse than pepper spray and over 1000 times hotter than a jalapeno.
A step up from that is Mad Dog 357, which clocks in around 9,000,000 SHU. That's so hot that you should have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation both before and after eating it.
AshleyFoods.com
Dangerous AND ridiculously expensive? Count us in!
Booziest Beer
Folks were drinking beer 7,000 years ago in Iran, and you can bet it wasn't a hopsy brew with citrus undertones. Back in Mesopotamia and the like, when you had to worry about Gilgameshes and Krakens and the Wrath of the Titans, your beer needed to be pretty hefty to stave off night terrors. Don't bother Googling that, it's probably true.
Beer is going to happen pretty much any time some grain and sugar ferments, so it likely wasn't a very refined brew to start with -- that came with time. Nowadays, you have pale ales and stouts and Pilsners and all kinds of other words I once saw on an awesome website. I can't call myself an expert, but I do know that your average beer has under 10% alcohol by volume to make room for all the bubbles and limes we shove into it. But that's hardly an extreme beer. That's a porch beer.
For a truly intense beer, the kind that will make you see music and hear colors, you need to look into Snake Venom from Brewmeister, the most alcoholic beer in the world. There probably isn't any deadly reptile extract in this beer, but there might as well be. At 67.5%, this stuff is so alcoholic it's not even carbonated ... because all the bubbles got wasted and passed out. Reviews say it pours like whiskey and burns like hellfire, but does have a bit of a nice finish.
Drinksfeed.com
It can also unclog stubborn sink drains.
We'll just take their word for it, because 1) You can only get it in the U.K., 2) It's $76 a bottle, and 3) It sounds like we'd get the same experience from drinking paint thinner.
Fattiest Burger
A hamburger is one of the greatest foods in the history of face-stuffing. Beef and bread at its very core, and then improved upon with garnishes like cheese, bacon, a second slab of beef, a third slab of beef and then five more slabs of beef ... you just can't go wrong with that recipe.
The Heart Attack Grill, the infamous Las Vegas restaurant known for having more than one spokesman who literally died, offers up the unholy Octuple Bypass Burger: a solid four pounds of beef that you can have garnished with 40 slices of bacon. It clocks in at just under 20,000 calories. This is literally all you need to eat for 10 days.
Business Insider
If you don't finish it, the server spanks you. That's actually not a joke.
At well over a foot tall, the Octuple Bypass is 8 half-pound patties, each with 5 strips of bacon, as well as cheese, tomato, onion and chili. It's less a meal and more of a punishment, but if you must have the most challenging burger money can buy, this is the one you want.
Most Caffeinated Coffee
They say to take all things in moderation, and caffeine definitely fits that bill. A spoonful of pure caffeine will kill you as dead as disco, so it's not to be trifled with. But a little kicker in your coffee isn't so bad, right?
Black Insomnia coffee is the answer to the question "how do I juice my brain up like an electric eel at a rave?" It has 702 milligrams of caffeine per 12 ounce cup. A tall Starbucks dark roast has about 193. A Red Bull has 110. A Mega Monster energy drink has 240 grams, but they also call that three servings. It's safe to say Black Insomnia is not for the weak of heart, probably because a weak heart can't physically handle it.
Ajc.com
It comes with a side of heroin and the ghost of your grandfather.
The Mayo Clinic says that up to 400mg of caffeine is probably safe in a day, which is a solid 10 Pepsis. Black Insomnia is pushing you well over that limit, which means you're likely to start feeling the effects after the very first sip. Effects like headaches, muscle tremors, rapid heart rate, frequent urination and -- no surprise here -- insomnia. With that much caffeine, we're pretty sure you could get amped, just from smelling it.
World's Biggest Steak
Across the sea, in the fabled land of Eng, at the George Pub and Grill in County Durham, one mad chef took steakery to the next level and then laughed at that level as he moved up several more, by offering a 220 oz steak. That works out to just under 14 lbs of steak, which is slightly less than two newborn humans ... or about the weight of your average Australian Terrier.
The steak is 2 inches thick, and diners at the pub can take on the challenge of eating it, 4 people at a time, in 45 minutes. That's still over 3 lbs of beef per person. And you need to give 24 hours notice to have it cooked, because it's a special order from the butcher ... who basically just has to shake the bones out of a cow and then put it on a plate.
Metro
"It's a pleasure to meat you."
But, wait, if it's huge meat you're looking for ...
World's Biggest Meal
Bigger is better when it comes to Texas, TVs and unseemly internet content. But what qualifies as the biggest meal you can cook? A whole, roasted pig has some bulk to it. A turducken is a work of culinary art. But those pale in comparison to the legendary Bedouin wedding feast so bizarre that people didn't even believe it was a real food: an entire roast camel.
A recipe circulating some years ago got the Snopes treatment from people who thought it must be a joke. It asks you to skin an entire camel, a sheep, 40 chickens, fish and eggs among other things, and roast the whole monstrosity like a vulgar, meat golem, to be thrown into the desert to appease the mighty Sarlacc.
Even after Snopes determined that yes, the recipe was real, people still weren't sure it was a thing anyone had ever made. Surely it was a joke recipe, a cute addition to a cookbook meant to make grandma chuckle as she searched for salmon aspic. And then there were pictures.
Recipegreat.com
It's basically a reenactment of Noah's Ark.
True to its word, the recipe was a thing of reckless culinary beauty -- a protein-bomb that nature could have never organized, likely requiring several men to lift because that's how you cater a wedding.
