No suggestions except to say that this sounds super cool!

there's a fair bit of difference between fresh and dried chili heat and receptors (in different people) so heat experience can be quite different.
Has to do with the different capsaicinoids and their differential break down (when heated or dried)

The first time I put a chili pepper in my mouth, I was about 11. A friend's father grew them in their yard. His son offered me one. I took a bite.

Some friend, lol.

For the next 20 minutes, regardless of how much milk I drank, I was one sweaty, snotty, uncomfortable kid. Everyone had a good laugh (but me).

Now I love them, but I avoid really hot varieties. I remember that 11-year-old kid.

How hot are you planning to go?

I am interested in Mexican gourmet food using the capsicum or heat of peppers with savory or sweet sauces or Mole. The cooking ideas originate from Oaxaca region mostly.

Hello! I'm writing from Mexico, where we use chile a lot, as you no doubt know.
Here we have a kind of tradition: if someone asks how hot a particular variety of chile is, we always underestimate it in our answer. A rule of thumb is that a chile pepper is two or three notches *hotter* than what the other person says it is.

Look into chili tepin (aka Chiltepin) which are as hot -or hotter- than most habanero, but don't burn. The heat is fast, but doesn't build.

Sichuan peppers are hot, but have an entirely different mechanism and thus are an entirely different experience.

Also birds don't get the burn from capsicum, which is why those bastard mockingbirds steal my precious chili tepins. They just think they are cute, sweet, red berries.

This is one of my favorite spice topics! I have a slight pepper obsession. 🌶

NMSU guide to scientific measurement of chile heat https://pubs.nmsu.edu/_h/H237/

Don't neglect my favorite pepper of all, habaneros! They have such a wonderful fruity flavor, much more complex than other varieties. There are some related South American varieties that have a similar flavor but less heat.

Manazanas are my other favorite, but they're pretty hard to find.

I was raised on hot food, so I guess I developed a tolerance for it early. I remember when I was 9, I made some hot sauce that was too hot for any of the adults to eat. I thought it was tasty.

@Sheril

For me, heat enhances a meal. Yes, it opens the nasal airways, but I think that contributes to more flavor / intensity.

But I like flavor and not just heat and it's so easy to overdue it.

Funny story - my wife grows and dries tons of chiles and had a basket of scotch bonnets sitting in a bowl on the counter. My eldest son came by and saw them (they are rather tiny) and popped one in his mouth and almost instantly regretted it.

The other anecdote is that you can't really wash the oil off your hands and after cutting a few Thai chile peppers with my bare hands, I rubbed my eye about 30 minutes later and was in intense pain for the next 10-15 minutes. (the only way I've learned is you can dilute the oil by rubbing vegetable oil on your hands to lessen the impact - or wear gloves while processing them)

Good luck with the epidosde!

I had a chilli salad in Thailand 😀 It was just chopped chillies with soy, lime and peanut. It was delicious, but I was unable to talk for about half an hour from the intense heat. The one thing that helped with the heat was having more, which just made it more intense!

I found this article about their history interesting, particularly about how the hot pepper spread through the world's cuisine and also how the confusing naming of using the word pepper happened. https://www.legalnomads.com/history-chili-peppers/

Internet flashed lipgloss with pepper, claiming to produce pink, plump lips. THAT I had to try. BUT with DIY gloss.
I had a 'Madame Jeanette'. So; sap on the lips, with cream.
It felt nice. Until it no longer did. And really burned. I could not rinse it off! The mirror showed me the red was halfway my nose. It was all thick and red.
10 minutes later, with burning lips, I withstood the important meeting with a client I had been preparing for. I kept my cool, but the heat, the looks...

you might want to reach out to Nina Mukherjee Furstenau. She’s a food writer and delightful. She wrote a book on green chilis: https://www.ninafurstenau.com

I actually love hot and spicy food. I haven’t found a limit to how much heat I can stand. But I don’t try to set records everytime. A nice healthy dose will do. I have a lot of environmental allergies and spicy food naturally suppresses my congestion for a day or two after the heat subsides.

😜

In dried form, many are not simply spice but sweetness, smokiness and body. Anchos are probably the best example on the list above, transforming from a sour green pepper into slightly spicy fruit leather.

“hot” spice does not register with me as heat, just pain. It makes me shovel the food down as fast as I can just for the comfort of the other sensations: the sweet, sour, salty, bitter, the textures, and the feeling of getting full.

I like a variety 🌶️ (and honey/sugar) as long as I wash my hands 😭, but with all of the fake news and shootings one can probabaly conclude the Alt Right heat is on 🔥 . Thanks for keeping us up to date with such a difficult task. https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/how-capsaicin-led-to-the-2021-nobel-prize-in-physiology.html#:~:text=Capsaicin%20activates%20the%20receptors%20present%20in%20the%20skin,receptors%20responsible%20for%20stimulation%20caused%20by%20moderate%20heat.

In the interest of science, I’ll share that, for me, food is spicy when it makes me hiccup.