Daeuber: Passage to India finds delicious balance of heat

Heat — that strange sense of pleasure and pain that comes from any number of spices added to a recipe — is a culinary tool that shows up in cuisines all over the world.

It makes its presence felt in your mouth in a lot of different ways. Where it comes from, how it feels and what it says about the cuisine you’re tasting is part of a complicated story.

In North America we like the fruity flavors of jalapeños and habaneros that make up a lot of the sauce we toss with chicken wings and pour on tacos. For a reliable level of heat that we can predict and manage without a lot of additional flavors, we adjust our cooking with cayenne.

For a little taste of old Europe we add the earthy flavors of horseradish. If we want to make an already complicated ethnic spice puzzle harder to pin down then