Southwest Stuffed Chicken

Since my last stuffed chicken went so well, I thought I'd try something similar. I was planning for a chicken stuffed with pepper jack cheese and chilies. However I was unable to find any green chilies, so faced with several choices I ended up selecting serrano peppers, thinking them less spicy than jalapeños. As this ended up being far from correct, it seems a perfect time to stop and explore the Scoville Scale, the measure of piquancy of a chili.

The hotness of a pepper is caused by a chemical compound called capsaicin (8-Methyl-N-vanillyl-trans-6-nonenamide). Capsaicin irrates the chemoreceptor nerve endings, particularly in mucous membranes, causing the familiar warm, burning sensation. This is gauged by the Scoville scale, with some common values below.

15,000,000–16,000,000 - Pure capsaicin
2,000,000–5,300,000 - Pepper spray
350,000–580,000 - Red Savina habanero
100,000–350,000 - Habanero chili
30,000–50,000 - Cayenne Pepper
10,000–23,000 - Serrano Pepper
2,500–8,000 - Jalapeño Pepper
100–500 - Pepperoncini

So it ends up that the green chilies I was looking for where probably somewhere in the 1500-2000 range, meaning the peppers I ended up with were a mere 5 to 10 times hotter.

When stuffing chicken I used to cut the breasts in half the short way and then pound them thin. But this seemed a little silly to me so now I cut them in half length-wise, simliar to butterflying, and no pounding is required. The breasts were sprinkled with salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes, then layered with pepper jack cheese and the serrano peppers. I knew by this point that they were hotter than I had orginally thought, but I didn't really know how much it really amounted to, so I ended up putting a bunch on. The chicken was then rolled up and secured with toothpicks and dredged in butter and a bread crumb mixture with a generous amount of chili power and more red pepper flakes (I figured why not, the thing was already like a 6 billion on the scale). Finally the rolls were baked at 400 for about 21 minutes.

It was in the end not nearly as spicy as I was expecting. I'm not totally sure why. It was hot enough to have me get a little sugar to help relieve the burn, (capsaicin is not water soluble, which is why water doesn't help), but not anymore then some hot wings. I was a big fan of the cheese though, so I was pretty happy with it overall.