SAMEA: ‘extreme, complex heat’

At the close of Givaudan’s Chef’s Council, four chefs sat down together. The conversation moved from technique to something more pointed: the gap between the food they’d cooked all week and what reaches consumers on a shelf. And that gap is about culinary understanding. This is the episode where heritage, science and the commercial reality of taking authentic heat to market at scale come together.

There’s a difference between heat and warmth, and Chef Cyrus Todiwala has spent more than three decades in London making the case for it. Heat, he explains, is chilli-driven and fleeting; warmth is spice-driven and built to last – a whole-body experience rooted in the Ayurvedic principle Hippocrates carried home from India in 323 BC. In this episode he unpacks why layering matters more than intensity, and what European palates are only now becoming ready to taste.

For Chef Mythrayie Iyer, Noma-trained, San Pellegrino Young Chef winner, and a head of R&D who says ‘extreme’ flavour has nothing to do with how much something burns. It’s about character: how much an ingredient shows up on the plate. A chilli, she points out, might scorch you at first and leave a floral note at the end. This episode runs from a childhood spice-market memory to the science of fermentation, and the complexity it can build.

After nearly 40 years in Chinese kitchens, training professional chefs and leading R&D for major restaurant groups in Shanghai, Chef Qian YiBin builds heat as something layered, never something singular. In this episode he shows how classic Sichuan málà beef, lifted with tangerine peel, becomes a sequence rather than a single hit: aroma first, then the numbing tingle, then the warmth. It’s a case for spice as one voice in a chorus – and why, for him, the most unforgettable heat is the kind that resonates long after the last bite. Listen on the landing page.

Born in Mexico, trained across Italian and Mediterranean kitchens for 27 years, Chef Saul Montiel treats every pepper as a personality to be understood and respected. His theme is timing: heat that arrives in stages rather than all at once, built like a song so the spice reveals itself slowly. He’s candid about the gap between an American fear of spice and what layered heat can actually be – and why he believes spicy is the new sweet.

Mexico has more than 120 chillies, and Chef Ricardo Muñoz Zurita, the ‘anthropologist of Mexican cuisine’ and author of twelve books, knows the difference every one of them makes. In this episode he shows how a single jalapeño becomes three distinct ingredients depending on whether it’s fresh, dried or smoked, and makes the case that great Mexican heat is never about maximum spice. It’s about balance: where a whole chilli dropped into a stew adds, in his words, the soul of the flavour.