Pran Naga Pickle – the hot sauce that nearly killed me.

Last Updated on March 18, 2023

You may think that headline is a bit much, but it’s possibly not too far from the truth…

I found this Naga pickle in a local ‘International Food Store’, we have loads of them in Ipswich and they’re more prevalent than the long-dead corner shops everywhere, and have a much better range of foods (especially hot sauces).  

When I bought this jar of pickle the fella behind the counter picked it up and looked me squarely in the eye, in much the same manner as one might eye someone who tells you he plans to rob the crown jewels wearing nothing but the front half of a pantomime horse costume.

“Er, have you had Naga before?”

I thought this was the sort of question that might result in the item being withdrawn from grubby wanton mitts.  I replied that, indeed I have had Naga before.  This is true, I love Naga, although the Naga Vodka I made possibly contravenes the Geneva convention (more on that another time).

As with a lot of hot sauces, I buy I gave this Naga Pickle a trial by cheese and cracker.  On first taste, this Naga pickle didn’t seem too harsh, just a very clean toppy (and slightly zesty) burn.  I smeared another incredibly thin amount on a generous chunk of cheese and popped it into my pie hole whole.

It was around the fourth cracker that I started to develop suspicions that the burn from the first cracker was still building.  Then I got the ‘creeping dread’ – that feeling that rises slowly from the heart of your torso and spreads throughout every fibre of your being.  

It’s a feeling that things are bad now, but they’re about to get a lot worse.  It’s a runaway train of pain.  I fell out of a second-story window when I was a teenager, and I can remember thinking (as I fell through the air) that the few seconds before I met the ground might be the last I would ever experience without pain.  I was thinking back to the moment before that first cracker entered my smacker in the same way.

Then it really hit me.

Every part of the taste trauma to this point had been a tickle on the cods compared to the studded boot that was about to grind into my soul with the brute force of a petrol-engine-powered genital discourtesy.

I’ve ‘achieved’ aural annihilation this intense a few times before, well ‘nearly’ this intense.

This grew, and spread until it consumed me.  When us fellas get a thwack in the crackers it’s a pain that grows tendril-like throughout your body until each tendril tightens and rips through nerves in your body that are normally left to slumber.  Machine gun bullets of agony force blacked bile into every cell of your corporeal crap-house.  The Pran Naga Pickle was worse.

It did not stop.

It would not stop.

It felt like the end would never come.

I wanted the end to come, if that’s what it took for the pain to stop.

In the past when I’ve accidentally scarred my innards with hot sauce the abatement of the pain brought with it a sweet and tender release, a feeling so good and calming that it was almost worth the accidental overdose in order to revel in the sweet relief after the agony.

It did not stop.

It would not stop.

It felt like the end would never come.

I wanted the end to come, if that’s what it took for the pain to stop.

I woke up several times throughout the night, alarmed and terrified into a waking nightmare when my tongue found a microscopic section of my mouth that I had failed to scrub clean, a microscopic section harbouring hell in pickle form.

A few weeks later, an entire section of the side of one of my teeth fell out, I seriously think it may have been weakened by this Naga Pickle.

I spent the entirety of the following day either sitting on the crapper fighting back meaty tears or curled up cradling my stomach, which felt like it had been kicked by a horse.  I have never experienced discomfort like that brought upon me by Pran Naga Pickle, and I speak as someone who once fell out of a car doing 50mph and landed on my face.

All being said this jar is still in my cupboard, and I quite fancy a quick spoonful…

P.S a little research has revealed that this Naga Pickle is on a banned foods list in Scotland on account of containing a potentially carcinogenic food colouring.