In Oaxaca, Some Like It Very Hot

The food in this iconic Mexican city was enough to bring tears to my eyes

- Robert Kiener

Walking through the bustling Abasto Market in Oaxaca City, Mexico, I am overwhelmed by the colourful, pungent mountains of fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, and fowl. As I pick my way over slippery floors and dodge scurrying customers, vendors offer me everything from exotic three-cow's-milk cheeses to the local specialty, chapulines, or fried grasshoppers.

I refuse to let them put me off my quest. I have come to Oaxaca (pronounced 'wa-HA-ca), one of Mexico's culinary centres, in my search for some of the world's hottest chilli peppers.

My guide, noted Mexican cooking expert and cookbook author Susana Trilling, leads me around a corner and we come upon stall after stall of chilli peppers in every conceivable shape, size and colour. They are piled high on wooden crates, spill out of plastic laundry baskets and overflow from brown burlap sacks.

We have a wider variety of chilli peppers here than almost any other place in the world, Susana declares.

Indeed, chilli pepper fanatics from around the world, known as 'chilliheads', make pilgrimages to this market to worship at the altar of the humble, but addictive, fruit.

Susana greets a chilli pepper vendor like an old friend and begins pointing out the different varieties: dark-brown chipotles, the spherical cascabel, the dried red guajillo, green and red serranos, 10-centimetre-long mirasol, bullet-shaped piquins, the jalapeño.

At another stall she shows me some habaneros-lantern-shaped, bright-orange chillis that look beguilingly beautiful. As I reach for one, Susana grabs my arm. Don't touch that one unless you're wearing gloves, she tells me. It's dangerously hot. If you touch a habanero with bare hands and absentmindedly rub your eyes, it will be very painful, she adds.