Field of Science

That was some spicy soup - a typo?

The Phactors have been part of a monthly dinner group for nearly 40 years. Out last meeting featured a Portuguese spicy kale soup (caldo verde), almost a national dish.  It's made with a spicy sausage, chicken broth, and a lot of kale.  The soup turned out extremely spicy even though the person who prepared the soup only used half of the 14 teaspoons of black pepper the recipe called for.  Now that is a crap load of black pepper by anyone's standards and even with just 7 tsp the soup was on the edge of what most of us could deal with.  This number, 14 tsp bothered TPP, because having made this soup years ago, he had no memory of extreme spiciness, and a quick google search could not find a recipe calling for so much pepper. The soup basically relies on the sausage for the spicy taste and most to the recipes called for 1/4 tsp of black pepper for a recipe using 12 to 16 ounces of sausage, a typical batch for 6-8 servings.  14 was such an odd number, but what if the recipe got copied or transcribed wrongly deleting the / between the 1 and 4 thus increasing the amount of black pepper by 56 times.  Now that is spicy, although we sometimes don't think of black pepper as that spicy.  At least the anti-bacterial qualities of that much black pepper certainly protected us from any contamination on the kale.

1 comment:

The Phytophactor said...

FYI. Hypothesis was correct! Somehow in copying the recipe, /s disappeared, but another cook realized that cutting the sausage into 14 inch thick slices made no sense, so when the 14 tsp of black pepper appeared they noticed the pattern and used the correct amount.