WARNING: Do NOT do the One Chip Challenge

I realize that some other people have written about their experience here with the OCC and I truly wish I had read some of them prior to doing it myself last night. But alas, I am a dumbass.

I will qualify this post by giving some context for my spice tolerance. I LOVE spicy food. I LOVE fresh hot peppers. I have grown everything from jalapeños to cayenne peppers all the way up to ghosts and Carolina reapers. I have indulged in them all raw right off the stem, and cooked with them in excess.

The food I cook for myself on a near daily basis is too hot to serve to guests. I have to make a deliberate effort to reduce the level of spice I add if I have guests or no one can eat my food. I use Extra Hot Franks Red Hot as liberally as one would use ketchup. I eat spicy food almost every day and have built up a tolerance much higher than anyone I know IRL for sure. I have a reputation amongst my friends and family for being “dead from the neck up” or having an “ass/stomach/mouth of steel”.

Ok. With that out of the way, let’s get to this chip.

I have eaten the Paqui ghost pepper chips many times and consider them to be reasonably mild. I expected the OCC to be a very intensified version of that. I was wrong. So wrong.

First of all, this thing tastes absolutely disgusting. Truly one of the worst tasting things I’ve ever eaten. The flavour alone is enough to make you puke (more on this later.) It tastes like poison. Maybe what I expect motor oil to taste like. Just awful.

The “heat” is a weird point to talk about because I didn’t actually find it to be hot at all. Excruciatingly painful? Yes. But the pain is nothing like the spicy sensation you get from hot sauce or chilli peppers. I wouldn’t call it spicy. It just felt like a horrible chemical burn in my throat and on the tip of my tongue. It’s what I imagine it would be like to drink gasoline. Extremely painful but not “spicy”. No gradual build. No hum or sting. No aromatic flavours. Just unbearable burning. Nothing pleasant about it in the least.

My bottom lip started quiver and my ear canals felt like they were punctured.

I initially reached for water which helped for a brief second as I swallowed but the pain instantly returned as soon as the water left my mouth. I then went for the (non-dairy) milk and wound up guzzling half a carton in seconds. After a minute or two the burning began to subside and was far more like something I would call “very spicy” but the immediate indigestion from the chip mixed with the large amount of milk was a recipe for disaster.

My immediate thought was to try to poop it out right away but while sitting on the toilet I started to burp. I grabbed the garbage can off the bathroom floor and violently vomited blue milk into it and on the floor. I projectile puked so hard I overshot the trash can.

The flavour of the chip coming back up was so disgusting that it caused me to puke even harder.

Then the stomach pain started. Usually when I think about cramps I think about my lower stomach area. But with this chip, the pain was in my upper abdomen and up between my ribs. In addition to being cramped, I had a strong cold burn in my abdomen that felt like the sensation caused my very strong mint gum. I got the chills and started chattering.

I should mention this all happened around 9:30PM. I had eaten a good hearty stir fry around 7:00 so my stomach was certainly not empty.

For the next two hours I continued to shake, chatter, shit, and burp that god awful flavour.

At 11:30PM I puked again. REALLY hard. Probably the hardest I’ve ever puked in my life. And out came my entire dinner with chunks of blue tortilla chip in it. Again the awful taste caused me to barf more while I was actively barfing. Barfing from the flavour of your barf is a truly unique and terrible experience I hope to never relive. Bringing the chip back up also reignited the burning in my throat and mouth to a level I absolutely did not want while already feeling so sick.

At 12:00 I dragged my sorry ass into the shower so exhausted I barely made it out. I literally puked out every ounce of my energy.

I crashed just after 1:00AM, still very nauseous and thinking I might puke again, and thankfully was able to sleep through the night without incident. I was terrified I was going to wake up and vomit everywhere or even shit my bed. Neither happened.

I woke up at 7:30 this morning with some mild lower cramps but generally feeling much better. When I pooped the cramps were relieved but to my surprise I was actually constipated probably because I’m dehydrated from puking so much.

Then came the ass burn. This is not the time to scroll on your phone while sitting on the toilet. Wipe and get it off your skin ASAP. The acid was burning not just my butthole but my butt cheeks and any other skin it contacted. I fully expected to find blood in the toilet, but thankfully there wasn’t any.

It’s now 9AM. Nearly 12 hours have passed. I feel a lot better but I know I’m not in the clear yet. I’m going to try to eat as bland as possible today and hope that I’m fully past this in the next few hours, but I can already feel another acidic poop brewing.

Basically, eating this chip is not a spicy experience. It is not an interesting test of your heat tolerance (as I hoped it would be). There are literally no good reasons to do it. It is just self induced food poisoning… or more accurately, capsaicin poisoning. Yes, that’s a real thing. Look it up. And I paid $9 to make myself sicker than I’ve ever been.

Be smarter than me. Don’t do the One Chip Challenge.

TLDR: the OCC is just self induced food poisoning. There is no novelty to it. 0/10 would not recommend.