Seasoned Advice is a question and answer site for professional and amateur chefs. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
It's well-known that if you eat spicy food, you can neutralize the flavor (and thus stop your mouth from burning like a forest fire) by drinking milk. This is due to casein. Simply drinking water or something cold does not achieve the same effect.
But I'm vegan, so I don't drink milk. So what else can I consume (that's vegan) to quickly neutralize spicy flavors?
This is not a duplicate of How can I wash down spicy food?, as the advice there concentrates on dairy products.
I have done no testing of this at all but I was surprised to find on this site that they recommend trying a spoon full (or cube of) sugar.
Perhaps the easiest way of calming down a flaming mouth is by sucking on a sugar cube or holding a teaspoon of sugar in your mouth. This helps by absorbing the spicy oil that is coating your mouth, as well as giving you a different, strong taste to concentrate on. A bit of mind-trickery and science combined!
Other things I've eaten in the past include starches, like bread or rice.
Here's a fun infographic and most of the items on it are vegan:
from here
Avocado would be the classic answer IME (often in the form of guacamole, but not required to be in that form.) AFAIK it's the fat effectively diluting the hot pepper oil in either case, (where it's unaffected by water since it won't mix) rather than any enzyme.
...and then there's not making the food so spicy it's uncomfortable (horribly unfashionable, I know, but I care less and less about fashionable as time passes.)
There's a great answer to this from Vietnam, where super-spicy food is popular and dairy generally isn't. It combines many of the other suggestions into something wonderfully smooth and soothing:
Here's one example recipe and pic. Note that in Vietnam, they love (non-vegan) condensed milk and tend to add it to everything - just skip the condensed milk, and in its place add more coconut milk and a little more sugar.
It has everything you'd want to cool chillies: creamyness, crushed ice, liquid, fats, sugars, along with a very mild non-clashing flavour and lots of nutritional value.
I've seen various variants on this which are even more cooling and soothing by adding aloe vera or blended cucumber - or give it a slight kick with some lemon juice.
Try a nut milk (almond comes to mind), soy milk or coconut milk. Here's a highly rated recipe for vegan "Sour Cream".
I've always liked the bread solution more than the dairy solution. It somehow feels to me that bread "mops up" the spicy stuff from my mucosa, while dairy dissolves it, but also spreads it around in my mouth. Maybe it's just a matter of personal preference, but when you can't have dairy, and even when you can, bread is worth to try. Just a piece of fresh white wheat bread without anything on it, no butter etc. Fluffier is better.
I generally eat yeast bread, but if your dietary restrictions don't permit it, I think chemically leavened bread should work sufficiently well.
Im surprised not to see raw cucumber here - I thought it was a standard go-to. Sliced, or just munch on one raw, depending on how much of your mouth is on fire :-)
Obvious answer is strong alcohol like vodka. It doesn't contain any animal products so I suppose vegan can use it.
I am an omnivore but even better than milk I HIGHLY recommend a starch to correct a mouth burn from capacasain. The ideal being Wonderbread type of bread.
If at a restaurant you should be able to be able to order 1 of these depending if its Asian (rice, add coconut), Latin American (flour tortillas, sweet potatoes, add avacado) African (injera), Euro or euro-american (pasta, bread, potato) or middle eastern, (couscous, lemon).
At home most people in English language countries have either bread or cooked rice.
Soft white sliced commercial bread (i.e. Wonderbread etc.) is ideal but even pita bread can work. Tear off crust, pop in mouth, can use additional slices to rub on lips etc if it's a child or very sensitive adult. Make sure child washes hands with lathery soap!
When I was 6 I opened a butter tub but it was being used as Tupperware and filled with jalapeno liquid w the peppers. I didn't eat it, but it got on my hands and I only washed it off with water. of course my hands got in my mouth eventually. I thought I was dying as I had only been exposed to Irish-American cooking, (mostly boiled veggies, meats, only spices like salt, peppercorn or paprika). The wonder bread helped immensely.
You could also eat spicy food more often, that way you'll get used to it and won't need to wash away the spice.
Your tolerance will get higher pretty quickly.
If you are preparing the spicy food yourself, the easiest way to mitigate the Capsaicin "burn" is the well tried Szechuan method of adding some sugar to the cooking.
If you are dining out, the way I have mitigated the "burn" after more than a decade living in South East Asia and Sri Lanka, is to eat a spoonful of plain steamed rice. Rather than drinking anything which will just wash the Capsaicin further down your digestive tract, the rice will quickly absorb the enzyme in your mouth, thus reducing any further ill effects.
Both these methods will work for vegans and non-vegans.
Tofu works amazingly well, especially fresh and cold from the fridge. I just tried it for the worst mouth on fire, and it worked immediately!
One possibility is to take a small amount of coconut oil in your mouth and let it melt, then swish it around and swallow. It should absorb the capsaicin oil and take it along out of your mouth.
Trader Joe's organic virgin coconut oil would be my particular recommendation; it has a well-rounded, sweet coconut flavor and good texture. It's not explicitly marked as vegan as far as I can tell, but I'd think it would be fine.
My Family are usually Water Drinkers at a restaurant since soft drinks are pricy. However, one time my Dad was eating out as part of a Business Luncheon and out of the blue he decided to order Cranberry Juice. A little while into the meal he had something spicy and when he took a drink of his Cranberry Juice, the spiciness seemed to leave. I think he tried it again by eating the spicy food & then drinking Cranberry Juice right afterwards.
I think you could try having Cranberry Juice and luckily it's a popular enough drink that you won't have trouble finding it in your Grocery Store! :) I've also seen online that sucking on a citrus fruit could help with this!
You don't have to drink it for it to work; it just has to be in your mouth. Is that against the rules? I'm not vegan nor am I lactose intolerant, I also don't drink milk but I'll ask for a glass if this needs doing (and then spit it out).
