Just how hot is a hot chilli? It turns out it’s not that easy to measure. But it ranges from the blow-your-head off variety to stuff you can feed a toddler. In 1912 Wilbur Scoville put together a heat scale to measure the heat of chilli peppers and hot sauce. The so-called Scoville scale lists a sweet bell pepper as measuring a naught on the scale, and pure capsaicin as measuring 16,000,000 heat units. To put this into perspective, Tabasco pepper sauce measures 30,000 – 50,000 heat units.
Recently the Guinness World Records gave the award of the “hottest peppers on earth” to the Carolina Reaper peppers grown by Ed Currie in Fort Mill, South Carolina. But how accurately can this be measured? Click here to find out.
