![]() Brave souls claim that its flavor is notably citrusy (though how anybody can taste anything through that much burning is beyond me), and so it’s used largely in fruity hot sauces from its native Africa through the Caribbean. The first pepper on the list from the Eastern Hemisphere, the Fatalii is a chili from central and southern Africa. The habanero is actually a different variety of the same species as the Scotch Bonnet, though it’s used more in Mexico than in the Caribbean, lending a fruity and floral kick to Yucatanian food. Originating in the Amazon, this pepper was brought northward through Mexico (where most of them are grown now). This habanero is the orange kind you can buy in the grocery store, but just because they’re readily available doesn’t mean they’re less vicious than any of their cousins on this list. In ascending order, here’s how the hottest peppers in the world rank from the naturally occurring to the unnatural Frankensteins humans have created. When the Scoville Scale was created by Wilbur Scoville in 1912, he never could have imagined the human-engineered peppers that can be hundreds of times hotter than anything that occurs in nature. Which, for the sake of tester’s mouths, is a huge plus in today’s world of super peppers. While the test used to be more subjective and based on testers’ tastes, high-performance liquid chromatography has made it possible to measure the exact amount of capsaicin in the pepper possible. For example, a cup of jalapeño takes between 2,500 and 8,000 cups of sugar water to neutralize the spice, so it’s 2,500 to 8,000 SHU. The SHU range from zero up to the millions, each one representing how many cups of sugar water it would take to dilute a cup of the food to a neutral spiciness level. Items on the scale are ranked by their Scoville Heat Units (SHU), which measure the concentration of capsaicin (the active compound responsible for spice). The Scoville Scale is an objective scale used for measuring the spicy heat of peppers and other hot foods.
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