Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has some rather unorthodox parenting techniques.
The father-of-four revealed he punished his eldest daughter Poppy, 12, by serving her apple slices coated in chilli because she was being “disrespectful and rude.”
Oliver made his remarks at the BBC's Good Food Show in London last weekend, the Daily Mail reports.
Jamie Oliver with his wife Jools and their children Poppy, Petal, Daisy and Buddy
It quotes him making the tongue-in-cheek statement: “I give them chillies for punishment. It’s not very popular beating kids anymore, it’s not very fashionable and you are not allowed to do it and if you are a celebrity chef like me it does not look very good in the paper. So you need a few options.”
He then added: “Poppy was quite disrespectful and rude to me and she pushed her luck. In my day I would have got a bit of a telling-off but you’re not allowed to do that.
“Five minutes later she thought I had forgotten and I hadn’t. She asked for an apple. I cut it up into several pieces and rubbed it with Scotch Bonnet and it worked a treat. She ran up to mum and said, ‘This is peppery’. I was in the corner laughing. [Jools] said to me, ‘Don’t you ever do that again’.”
Scotch Bonnet chillies can score up to 300,000 points on the Scoville scale
There is an official heat scale for chillies known as The Scoville scale, devised by Wilbur Scoville in 1912.
Sweet peppers score 0 on the scale, while Jalapeno and chipotle varieties can score anything between 2,500 to 10,000. Habanero and Scotch Bonnets can score from 80,000 to 300,000, the BBC writes.
Last year Oliver set a new world record for chopping raw chilies. He sliced up 10 in 30 seconds, in a segment filmed for his YouTube channel.
Oliver, 39 and wife Jools, 38, are parents to Poppy Honey, 12, Daisy Boo, 11, Petal Blossom, 5, and son Buddy Bear, 4.
The couple were this year featured on the Sunday Times Rich List with a combined wealth of £240million, thanks to Oliver's restaurant chain, TV appearances, cookbook sales and his wife's childrenswear range.