Hot enough?

Andrew Glazer

COSTA MESA--The pair picked a perfect Peruvian pepper. They’ll pit the

perfect Peruvian pepper against pickled peppers, purple peppers and

probably piquant Pequin peppers.

Perhaps they’ll prevail.

“This year we have the yearn to burn,” said the ruddy-faced Carl Will,

49, who claims to eat roughly two pounds of chili peppers a month. “You

can’t beat our heat.”

Will, a carpenter who lives in Huntington Beach, and his partner Joe

Stead, 48, an OCC horticulturist from Tustin, will enter their golden Aji

peppers and Inca gold sauce in several pepper-related contests at the

Orange County Fair, underway through July 30.

Serendipitously, the theme of this year’s fair is “Hot! Hot! Hot!, a

Salute to the Pepper Industry.” And the partners’ pepper patch is less

than a mile from the fairgrounds.

Unlike dozens of other people entering items in the fair’s culinary

contests--which in years past focused on cakes, cookies and

strawberries--these two are not bandwagon pepper people. They have shared

a passion for peppers since they met more than 10 years ago, when Stead,

then a hardware distributor, sold tools to Will.

“We knew we’d have a long-term friendship,” Stead said. “And our

mutual love of peppers changed it forever.”

Both swear by the healing power of peppers, especially their pepper

ranked “seven out of 10” on the hot scale: Ajis.

Will said he hasn’t caught a cold, flu or even the sniffles since he

began gnawing on the Ajis, Thais, jalepenos and habaneros.

Capsaicin--the oil that gives peppers their spiciness--helps lower

cholesterol, prevent blood clots from forming, act as natural painkillers

and clear stuffed sinuses, according to “Healing Foods and Juices,” a

book published in 1999.

And for those brave enough to eat them, spicier peppers also provide a

healthy rush of endorphins high-producing chemical released by the brain.

“We have a salsa break at work every day,” Will said. “We all eat a

whole jar of it. Afterward, everyone’s faster talking, faster thinking.

It jump-starts the whole process and keeps you awake.”

Stead said it’s common to see a half-chomped pepper on his partner’s

tool box, laying next to his hammer and screwdrivers.

The two warn, though, that peppers can be dangerous.

Stead’s wife, a nurse, said she’s treated several Latina women--who

frequently use peppers in their cooking--for first-degree burns on their

hands from handling the hot stuff.

“You should really wear rubber gloves,” Stead advised.

And of course, there’s also the more common threat of minor intestinal

distress.

“You build a tolerance, the more you eat,” said Will’s pepper-loving

son, Adam, 28.

With a stronger constitution, Adam Will has in fact made his

pepper-tasting services available to his father and Stead.

“We use my son as a barometer,” Carl Will said. “When the sweat beads

up on the side of his head, we know we’re doing something right. It’s a

tough business, so we reserve it for the youth.”