Why Red Pepper Flakes?
Why Red Pepper Flakes? It’s because I love food and cooking (we cook quite often here at Squeaky headquarter), and when you grow up in Indonesia where hot food is the norm, I put hot pepper flakes on almost everything. It’s a dash of flavor that I crave. I like this explanation by Cookthink blog:
Why do we use red pepper flakes in so many recipes?
… We think of red pepper flakes as a kind of culinary highlighter. {What an awesome description!}
We use red pepper flakes so often that we’ve come to think of them as the third standard seasoning, after salt and pepper. We use it as a flavor highlighter. In addition to the fives tastes — sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami — our tongues detect capsaicin, the main ingredient found in any hot chile. The heat of capsaicin in red pepper flakes “points up” the taste of ingredients they season. So, no matter what tastes and flavors you have going on in a dish, a pinch of red pepper flakes will help clarify and those tastes and flavors without necessarily adding heat (though you can add plenty of heat by adding red pepper flakes).
I’d like to think that applies to more than just food. We designers go crazy over many pixels, points and picas to get the right “feel” that highlights the elements in our design. We fuzz over the right color combination, the right typography, the right icons, the right balance… basically, the right final package. Well, go ahead, sprinkle on those pretty red pepper flakes and let them taste it. And it’s good for you: a hot pepper contain 357 percent more vitamin C than an orange. {That’s why I hardly get sick! Well I do get sick because I’m human after all, but very rarely!}
Of course I think I’m just like my favorite red sprinkles: A pinch of heat, a dash of feisty and sure makes you cry (happily) sometimes. People who know me well can vouch for that.
So when your older siblings tricked you into biting super hot chili peppers by stuffing them into everything on the dinner table (this might actually happened but all I remembered was me rushing to the fridge and guzzling cold water for what felt like hours), thank them if it turned you into a hot-pepper-eating, superhero-power, ranting-and-rambling machine.