The Scoville Scale also known as the Scoville Heat Scale
When you eat something spicy, do you ever wonder how people measure its intensity? Have you ever thought of the reason behind how people know the degrees of hotness such as, mild, extra hot and the adjectives and superlatives used to describe the taste that could reduce any grown man into tears? The Scoville Scale is the Richter scale of chili peppers— by units, it is able to detect how much spice there is in a chili, and how much of a gastronomic pandemonium it will cause.
Taking the name of its inventor Wilbur Scoville, the scale uses the capsaicin components of the chili that indicates how spicy it is. Capsaicin is the active ingredient in peppers that acts as an irritant to both animals and humans, hence the reaction we get from eating one. The foundation of scoville scale is based on the Organoleptic Test, which uses the alcohol extract of the capsaicin oil from a specified volume of chili peppers. It is added to a sugar and water solution until the hotness is visibly seen by a group of professional tasters. The heat is measured by how “diluted” it is. One scoville unit is detected when it takes once to dilute the pepper’s extract. The habanero pepper which one of the hottest in the world takes over 200,000 times to dilute its extract before all the capsaicin content is undetectable, thus giving its number of scoville units.
According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the Bhut Jolokia pepper or Ghost Pepper from the rural regions of India is the world’s hottest pepper with a whopping 16,000,000 scoville units, and 1, 0421, 427 units using HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography). It is more than 500 times hotter than the Tabasco hot sauce. The scoville scale is the favorite measuring system of many chefs and culinary daredevils around the world. Without it, only the imagination and experience could tell how hot a pepper is. You wouldn’t want to shower your lunch with a glob of edible lava without knowing it wouldn’t you?
