Searching For The Higher High – The World’s Hottest Chile Peppers

To a true chilehead it often comes as a shock to realize that most people they meet have never had anything hotter than a nacho jalapeno slice in their mouth.

Why? Because as hot as that jalapeno may seem to you, there is actually more heat levels above it than below it.

What Exactly is a Chilehead?

“Chilehead” is what people who love hot peppers and hot foods in general typically call themselves. Naturally this comes from the chile pepper — a good source of tongue burning heat.

Don’t be confused — chile with an “e” refers to the peppers. Chili with an “i” refers to the bean and bean TexMex stew that is good in winter and ruined in Cincinnati. It’s a safe bet that most chileheads (with an “e”) also enjoy spicy chili (with an “i”), but they are two completely different things.

As mentioned above, chile peppers are the most common source of the mouth burning heat, but not the only one. Mustard, horseradish, ginger, black pepper and several other foods can also deliver the goods. But really, “horseradish-heads” sounds silly.

Red Hot Chile Peppers

Now about that jalapeno.

The burning sensation in chile peppers comes form a chemical called capsaicin. The level of apparent heat we feel is measured on something called the Scoville Scale and the amount is given in Scoville Units. It’s much too complicated to explain how this is determined here — but basically, the more capsaisin in a pepper the hotter it will feel and the more Scoville Units it will be given. The Scoville Scale is linear — so a pepper with a 1000 Scoville units will feel twice as hot as one with 500.

Now — back to our jalapeno. Your typical nacho jalapeno slice will rate about 1,000 Scoville Units. If you have ever bought fresh (unpickled) jalapenos and eaten them, you have experienced up to 5,000 Scoville Units.

If you gasp for breath, break out in a sweat and have to blow your nose after eating these — you may want to stop reading now.

The Thai Chile comes in at around 75,000 Scoville Units — or 75 times hotter than a ballpark jalapeno. These peppers are used in many traditional Chinese and Southeast Asian cuisines. But don’t expect to encounter them at the egg roll place in the mall food court. These are way too hot for most people and most mass market places us chile oil or less hot peppers. You need to go to an authentic or high end Oriental restaurant to get them. Trust me, you’ll know when you bite into one.

On the extreme high end of our Scoville Scale are the habanero pepper and its cousin, the Scotch bonnet. These little pods can rate as high as a tongue melting 500,000 Scoville Units.

Reaching Ever Higher

Amazingly this is not the hottest food. The habanero variety, Red Savino, is considered the hottest pepper on the planet — but it is nothing compared to some of the extreme hot sauces being marketed today. By extracting the capsaicin and and concentrating it, hot sauce creators have achieved the unbelievable heat levels of 3,000,000+ Scoville Units.

It has been said that these sauces are to your typical jalapeno what Mount Everest is to an ant hill.

And this level of heat is the realm of the true chilihead. The kind of person who puts this on hamburgers, sandwiches, chicken wings — and in chili.

Heaven help us all.

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