I few more details there. Apparently there was a trend on ~The tok~ with children eating spicy chips in Germany that got them hospitalized, and as a precaution the Danes took these noodles with are more spicy of the shelves.
A bit more understandable now but still .. wut? If kids eat tide pods we don't remove tide pods.
I think it is very old thing, like 80s or before old. Various paint thinners can give drug like effects when inhaled. And then some products might contain nitrous oxide as pressurising gas.
> Apparently there was a trend on ~The tok~ with children eating spicy chips in Germany that got them hospitalized, and as a precaution the Danes took these noodles with are more spicy of the shelves.
These are legitimately hot. I’m the idiot who orders their curry “native extra spicy” and I have half-used bottles of ghost pepper sauces in the fridge. I love ludicrously spicy food.
The 2x ramen nearly beat me. The first fork was merely volcanic. Drinking the last of the broth in the bottom was infernal. It’s hot.
A few years ago I was really into spicy food. I would cut up entire ghost peppers or habaneros and put them in almost every meal. I was at the point where physically it made we sweat but i could actually enjoy the flavor.
Eating the 2x spicy ramen two days in a row destroyed my stomach and also had me in tears as that oil makes it linger. When I say destroyed i mean it took over a month for it to get back to normal and even after that it wasn’t like it was before.
I don’t eat any spicy food anymore. I could see why you might pull these.
The packet specifically in the BBC image - I was at the Chinese supermarket in London Chinatown, when some Korean students walked in and one of them saw those packets and said ‘oh yeah that’s the one that completely beat me.’
I was curious, so naturally I bought five packets.
I was unable to finish a single whole packet. Tried five times. Failed five times. Got very close but never quite made it.
I don't know if "acute poisoning" is gross exaggeration or some medical classification but having tried them and know people who really shouldn't have tried them fuck up their stomach for week+, these should be behind the counter purchase. I can see kids too audacious to know when to quit.
From browsing around it seems small children can be poisoned by amounts of capsaicin that are perfectly safe for adults (if unpleasant), and that Denmark might've been using the metric of "what if a small child consumed the entire sauce packet".
Same here, I eat spicy food all the time but these are on another level. I will eventually finish a bowl, but my lips and throat were always sensitive for a few hours afterwards. Using a half or a third of the sauce sachet is more than enough for me. I stopped buying them because as much as I enjoy spicy food this flavour was just pure extreme self-torture.
To add a bit more context directly from the Danish Food Agency:
> The amount of hot chili is even higher in the investigated noodles than in chili chips, which have previously led to poisoning injuries among children in Germany. That is why it is important that parents are aware of the extreme noodle varieties and avoid them, says Henrik Dammand Nielsen.
Without clicking the link I knew they were talking about which Buldak Ramen noodles. I grew up eating extremely spicy food and these ones were really high up on the spice scale.
But what’s the need to recall them? It seems like an overreach to me.
Agreed. I have a hard time believing anyone who could have serious problems from eating this stuff would be capable of eating enough of it to cause the problems.
I have seen people try to eat these to one up others. It almost always ends up in a disaster. High Scoville chillies are no joke and should be handled with care.
I'm not sure "poison" (or really, whatever word is being translated to "poison") necessarily means the spices pose a serious risk of death. There are less severe consequences that can still warrant intervention.
Primary source does not say the product is poison, but more about preventing "poisoning injuries" which apparently happened in Germany. Some kids got hospitalized.
Have you considered that the Danish food authorities might kind of know what they're doing? They're not going to label food as potentially harmful because they don't like the taste.
Yes, but then again there doesn't seem to be any Danish restriction on Fugu (pufferfish). Hard to see how this isn't a subjective policy (which is fine, but call it what it is).
Someone [0] mentioned that the spice package itself is closer to 250k SHU and only the final dish, noodles and all, is 10k. Since the oil from the spice package will be on the surface it will probably taste way hotter than for example a 10k sauce.
That seems unlikely. It felt waaaay hotter than jalapeño, like many times hotter, not just 1.5x hotter. If true, maybe it’s just the volume of it. Tabasco doesn’t register as hot at all to me, but I don’t make a habit of drinking it by the pint.
Absolutely ridiculous, what a joke. That’s comparable to El Yucateco sauce. Tabasco which is barely perceptible as hot is around 5000 scoville. Not to mention, isn’t capsaicin completely harmless and only activates your pain receptors without actually causing any direct damage (there may be damage from the inflammatory response in extreme cases).
I wonder if this is accurate because I love tons of that El Yucateco on my food (and frequently eat other spicy stuff almost daily), but the Buldak ramen I tried was was so spicy that I couldn't take it and didn't get close to finishing my bowl.
I don’t think it can cause direct damage in the way lye or a poison would. I could imagine it causing so much pain in someone that it triggered a seizure or something else awful.
Although I think almost anyone not trying out for “Jackass” would stop eating it well before they got to that point.
Scrolling down that page I see Resiniferatoxin is 1000x hotter than pure capsaicin. Seeing as it's a scale of concentration, I wonder if you can dilute it down to a mild hot sauce.
The 2x spicy noodles are too spicy for me, even as a lover of spicy food. It's literally like lava traveling through my stomach and intestines. The 1x, on the other hand, are freaking delicious. Very spicy but just absolutely incredible flavor, and it doesn't seem to destroy my stomach. I'm actually kind of addicted to the 1x, I have one of the little cups practically every day.
Banning these ramen is ridiculous, but very low spice tolerance is a thing. Used to work with a someone who could legit detect 3 black peppercorns in a gallon of chicken soup. It made the soup "a bit on a spicy side". It was so bizarre that we did an AB test to confirm it and it was true.
We had some neighbors growing up who my dad referred to as “meat boilers”, not intended complimentarily. They were surprised to see standard issue salt and pepper shakers on our kitchen table: “Ooh, you like your food spicy!”
The stew style, which seems to have been recalled as well, is my favorite instant ramen since it's very rich in flavor and has thick noodles. I usually add a couple of fresh Thai chilies (Prik Kee Noo) into the broth, it's not that spicy - though it's usually too much for people who can't handle capsaicin at all. Can't speak for the other ones though.
This feels like an overreaction by some bureaucrats which could have been handled with a warning sticker instead.
I wonder if this will have the same effect as the "parental advisory" sticker on music, where the demand for these noodles among Danish spicy food lovers will skyrocket. Since buldak noodles are already so much more expensive than regular noodles (at least in Northern Europe) and are sold as more of a novelty item, they might justify the extra cost of shipping or private import from another EU country.
A colleague who lives in Korea recommended these to me before. I stopped eating them because of the insane amount of salt in them, not the spice level!
Natural hot spice curry usually contains natural chilli pepper like bird's eye. It's hot but not chemical hot as these noodles. Proper chilli provides slowly expanding hot taste that starts not in mouth or throat, but somewhere deeper, in stomach maybe. It also tastes great. Chemical hot does not.
Danes (not all) will happily dig in to fermented fish variations like Surströmming though:
A newly opened can of surströmming has one of the most putrid food smells in the world, even stronger than similarly fermented fish dishes such as the Korean hongeohoe, the Japanese kusaya or the Icelandic hákarl.
Surströmming is not a danish thing, and I don't think we have a huge tradition or kitchen for fermented fish, it's a thing at the Faroese Islands, part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
It's mostly a swedish thing, and it's also my understanding that surströmming is a very northern Sweden kind of thing, so not common for southerners of Sweden either (which you might classify Denmark as, depending on your optics ;)).
Indeed. If you read carefully you'll note that not only was that not claimed a link was provided that identified Surströmming as a Swedish dish.
That said, I've eaten it in Denmark and am friends with a crowd of ex-pat Danes who all seem to enjoy fermented fish dishes and all manner of other "crazy European" (I'm Australian, so ...) food.
There's no claim here that all Danes love fermented fish, just the assertion that they've felt the need to ban | recall tins of rancid fish - just peppers of exceptional spice.
Dairy and various dairy products are big component of Nordic diets. Eggs are too common. It make sense to regulate the whole chain of production by single agency.
This is the same country that basically threatened to leave the EU when rules to limit the contents of ammonium chloride in food were proposed [0]. Source: am Danish.
Back in reality, one or more of the Danish, Swedish, Finnish and German representatives asked for an exemption to be included for traditional candy etc, and it was quickly added to the draft proposal.
I few more details there. Apparently there was a trend on ~The tok~ with children eating spicy chips in Germany that got them hospitalized, and as a precaution the Danes took these noodles with are more spicy of the shelves.
A bit more understandable now but still .. wut? If kids eat tide pods we don't remove tide pods.