Right off the bat, they resort to number one of the things you should never do when you eat spicy foods-chugging water. Their first mistake is improper preparation. Their initial giggles take a sharp turn into coughing, spitting, screaming, gagging and drooling. What follows is the most pure representation of immediate, wholehearted regret. They laugh nervously and crunch right into one whole pepper each. At the start of the video, which begins with the girls all done up for what they're sure will be a super funny, super cute video. Lizzy Wurst and her friend Sabrina (both maintain their own YouTube channels), decided to take on the Carolina Reaper challenge this summer, to hilarious effect. Luckily you don't have to wonder what it would be like to try to eat one-two teen girls did it for you. For scale, that's about 440 times hotter than a jalapeño. The fire-engine red peppers are in the Guinness Book of World Records for their heat level, which tops out at 2.2 million Scoville units. But even those who love their meal with a serious kick tremble at the thought of downing the king of the world's hottest peppers-the Carolina Reaper. In less than five years, the amount of hot peppers eaten by Americans has increased 8 percent, according to US Department of Agriculture statistics.Ĭurrie’s world record has created quite a stir in the world of chiliheads, said Ted Barrus, a blogger who has developed a following among hot pepper fans by videotaping himself eating the hottest peppers in the world and posting the videos on YouTube under the name Ted The Fire Breathing Idiot.With Sriracha and even Ghost Peppers creeping into the mainstream on restaurant menus, people are becoming more and more adventurous when it comes to spicy foods. He is also determined to build his company, PuckerButt Pepper Company, into something that will let the 50-year-old entrepreneur retire before his young kids grow up. Ever since he got the taste of a sweet hot pepper from the Caribbean a decade ago, he has been determined to breed the hottest pepper he can. He’s been interested in peppers all his life, the hotter the better. The world record is nice, but it’s just part of Currie’s grand plan. A formula then converts the readings into Scoville’s old scale. Now, scientists separate the capsaicinoids from the rest of the peppers and use liquid chromatography to detect the exact amount of the compounds. “I bite into a jalapeno - that’s too hot for me.” So the rating depended on a scientist’s tongue, a technique that Calloway is glad is no longer necessary. A scientist would then taste the solution and dilute it again and against until the heat was no longer detected. Pharmacist Wilbur Scoville devised the scale 100 years ago, taking a solution of sugar and water to dilute an extract made from the pepper. Pepper spray weighs in at about 2 million Scoville Units.
Currie’s world record batch of Carolina Reapers comes in at 1,569,300 Scoville Heat Units, with an individual pepper measured at 2.2 million. Zero is bland, and a regular jalapeno pepper registers around 5,000 on the Scoville scale. The heat of a pepper is measured in Scoville Heat Units. The higher concentration the hotter the pepper, said Cliff Calloway, the Winthrop University professor whose students tested Currie’s peppers. The science of hot peppers centers around chemicals compounds called capsaicinoids. The heat of a pepper depends not just on the plant’s genetics, but also where it is grown, said Paul Bosland, director of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University. The heat of Currie’s peppers was certified by students at Winthrop University who test food as part of their undergraduate classes.īut whether Currie’s peppers are truly the world’s hottest is a question that one scientist said can never be known. Last month, The Guinness Book of World Records decided Currie’s peppers were the hottest on Earth, ending a more than four-year drive to prove no one grows a more scorching chili.
On the other end is red fruit with a punch of heat nearly as potent as most pepper sprays used by police. Ed Currie holds one of his world-record Carolina Reaper peppers by the stem, which looks like the tail of a scorpion.