原创 How do you measure a Scoville?

Have you ever tasted a really spicy dish that brought tears to your eyes? Well, I just watched an excruciating video on YouTube that makes my eyes water just thinking about it.

This all started when a reader wrote the following in reaction to my column: "I'm hoping to get some Carolina Reapers from the PuckerButt Pepper Company in South Carolina."

Hmmm. PuckerButt Pepper Company. That's not something you hear every day. Furthermore, I'd never even heard of a Carolina Reaper, so I performed a search on the Internet.

First of all, I discovered that the Carolina Reaper is an extremely hot pepper bred by Ed Currie, who runs the PuckerButt Pepper Company. At the moment, the Carolina Reaper is coyly described as "the world's most piquant pepper" (I love the use of "piquant" in this context) with a Scoville heat unit rating of 2 million to 2.2 million. This puts it right up there with the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, and about twice as hot as the Bhut Jolokia (Ghost Pepper), which has a Scoville score of only 855,000 to 1,463,700.

Twice as hot as the Ghost Pepper? "OMG!" is all I can say. My son gave me a small bottle of Ghost Pepper condiment about a year ago. I put a couple of drops on a burger. I live in the hope that I will one day regain the use of my taste buds.

All of which leads me to this video showing what happens when some strange young men wrap their laughing tackle around a raw Carolina Reaper. This is one of those videos that you can't bear to watch, but you can't stop watching. It's like sitting on a horny dilemma the horns of a dilemma, metaphorically speaking.

All this led me to ponder a question: How do you actually determine how hot a pepper is? Or, to put this another way, what is a Scoville when it's at home, and how do set about measuring one? Well, it turns out that the Scoville scale is the measurement of the spicy heat of spicy foods as reported in Scoville heat units.

This scale is named after Wilbur Scoville, the American pharmacist who devised the Scoville Organoleptic Test in 1912. This test is really rather clever. I would never have come up with this myself in a million years. The way it works:

1. An exact weight of dried pepper is dissolved in alcohol to extract the heat components (capsinoids).
2. The resulting alcohol extract of capsaicin oil is mixed with a solution of water and sugar to the point where a panel of taste testers can barely detect the heat of the pepper.

The number of Scoville units assigned to the pepper is based on how much the oil has to be diluted with the sugar water to reach the point where the taste testers can barely detect the pepper's heat. If a pepper has a Scoville rating of 100,000, for example, this means the capsaicin oil from that pepper had to be diluted 100,000 times before the taste testers could barely detect the heat. The higher the dilution required, the higher the Scoville rating, and therefore the hotter the pepper.

I have a friend called Pablo from Guatemala. He has a lot of Mexican friends who make fun of him because he doesn't like his food as hot as they do. About six months ago, I presented Pablo with his very own bottle of Ghost Pepper sauce. Now, when his Mexican friends come around, Pablo casually mentions that this sauce is a tad on the warm side, and that they should use it sparingly. Taking this as a challenge, they lather it on -- an action they soon regret (LOL).

I wonder if one can purchase bottles of Carolina Reaper sauce? If so, I think I know what I'll be giving some of my chums for Christmas. How about you? Are you a consumer of capsaicin-based condiments? What's the hottest pepper and/or dish you've ever feasted upon? Would you eat it again? And do you think you'll ever be tempted by a dash of Carolina Reaper sauce?