09.14.05
How hot is it?
Since my last post was on chili, I guess I could expand on how a chili pepper gets its heat and how that heat is rated. Like most plants, the chili pepper relies on other animals to spread the fruits seeds. The problem is that when a mammal eats the fruit, the seeds get partially digested. This prevents most seeds from being viable. In order to prevent this, the plant evolved a defensive response to this and developed the fire we have come to know and love.
This poses a problem for the plant as how to distribute the seeds. Fortunately for the plant, birds do not have the taste buds to be able to detect the heat. And because the avian digestive tract lacks the ability to digest the seeds, they pass through its system unharmed.
So how hot is it? It is tough to describe how hot it is because it does not compare to much else in the food world. Flash back to 1912 and a man by the name of Wilbur Scoville decided that a scale needed to be developed to rate the “heat” of the chiles. A simple dilution test, Scoville combined pure ground chiles in a sugar-water solution and had a panel of testers try the solutions.
Increasing the dilution until the solution no longer burns a rating was devised. Measured in multiples of 100, there was now a way to gauge how hot that pepper really is. The bell pepper has a rating of zero, Tabasco sauce has a rating of about 2,500 (the pepper itself is much hotter at 30,000 or so) and the habanero pepper is the king starting at 100,000 all the way to over 500,000 depending on the variety.
The sauce I am working on only has habaneros in it. The compound that burns is called Capsaicin and in its purest form rates at 16,000,000 Scoville units. I have had 1,000,000 and even 10,000,000 unit sauces, though these are more like additives and I find that though there is much heat involved in them that there is little real taste. Kind of a bitter flavor and then the heat kicks in. While fine for giving a bit of fire to your dishes it doesn’t do much for me in the way of topping my foods.
As such, I am working on getting the most heat in my sauce while still getting a great flavor and being able to use it as an every day topping.