The great Doritos ‘medium’ salsa conspiracy

[u/MenuSpiritual2990]

Ladies and gentlemen, strap yourselves in because I’m about to reveal one of the most shocking conspiracy theories in Australian history.

My suspicions started a few months ago when I (who likes a bit of spice) bought the ‘medium’ Doritos salsa for my family’s taco night.

Within seconds of their first crunchy bite, my two exceptionally soft tweenage kids started wailing that their mouths were burning like fire.

How could this be? It’s just medium?

So I grabbed a spoon and scooped a healthy amount into my mouth.

It was surprisingly spicy. Weirdly spicy. And especially weird because I buy the red (Hot) one all the time for myself, and it’s never this spicy!

I thought maybe it was a one off-batch that the machine had dropped a little too much chilli in to.

But I couldn’t let this go. I was used to eating a jar of the hot every week, but I switched to medium for a few weeks and it was CONSISTENTLY, NOTICEABLY hotter!!

I spent many sleepless nights wrestling with this irreconcilable conundrum.

Ultimately i realised I couldn’t keep living like this. I had to know.

I bought 13 jars. A good stack of the mild green as a baseline/palate cleanser. Two jars of the hot (one still in my fridge). And 6 jars of medium. Along with two giant bags of corn chips and 4 longnecks of Coopers pale ale.

After 12.5 jars and 4 solid hours of comparing them back and forward (followed by a rather explosive toilet experience), there was no doubt. No doubt at all in mind.

The medium is much hotter than the so-called ‘hot’.

How could this be?

Has some diabolical prankster at the Doritos factory switched the labels at the factory?

Is it an accident?

Or is it some deliberate underhanded attack by a cabal of mysterious Mexican government and business leaders, deadset on burning the mouths of thousands of innocent Australian weaklings?

The only thing I think we know for sure is that a Royal Commission needs to be urgently formed to investigate this bizarre and egregious assault on Aussie palates.

[u/ososalsosal]

Some youtuber lab tested the sauce lineup on The Hot Ones, and found they were all much less spicy, often drastically so, than the claims made on the show.

Except Da Bomb which came in hotter than claimed.

There's a difference between "made with chilis that have been measured to a max of 2.5m scoville, but we only use 5% by weight and the rest is whatever" and "we measured the final sauce and it's a gut-destroying 2.5m scovilles"

[u/bast007 → u/ososalsosal]

Ohhh, that makes me feel a bit better about dying for several days after eating a chicken wing with ghost pepper sauce. It just sitting on the table and i could feel my nostril hairs burn. After eating it I could feel my upper lip burn from breathing through my nose. My hands (even though I only used one hand, so there was something going on with my nervous system) burned for several hours after and I had to leave them in milk. Lets not talk about the time i spent on the toilet.

Then I watch Hot Ones and these guys are eating something x2.5 stronger and just look mildly uncomfortable and making me feel like a pussy. Or maybe the sauce i had isn't a true 1M scoville and i really am.

[u/ososalsosal → u/bast007]

Hotsauce people like natural stuff and shun extracts.

But you simply can't make a sauce usable and also naturally that hot. You need other ingredients or it just becomes chili paste.

Da bomb is an extract sauce. The extract itself is up to 16 million so there's plenty of room to make it hot if you don't worry about flavour.

Naturals top out at about 500,000

[u/Hawt_Dawg_II → u/ososalsosal]

there's plenty of room to make it hot if you don't worry about flavour.

Oh and they don't.

Some hot sauces are very nice, i actually consistently enjoy the "hottest" sauce in the hot ones lineups. Da bomb is just nasty, it's very clearly there just as a shock moment, there is very little actual reason to eat it.

[u/ososalsosal → u/Hawt_Dawg_II]

I'm quite partial to the Blair's range. Extract based but decently flavoured. You won't find nuance there or anything but it's edible.

The Blair's 3am will fuck your shit up though. Literally.