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Turns out there's more than one way to measure the heat of a chile pepper. The best-known measure is the Scoville Heat Unit, named for pharmacist Wilbur Scoville who developed a test in 1912 to measure the amount of heat-producing capsaicins in a pepper. Originally, people were employed to assess the pungency of peppers, which led to a certain amount of subjectivity (not to mention tongue twisting). Today, Scoville units are measured using high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC), a more scientific, and less inflammatory, metric. It's generally agreed that the habaņero and its Caribbean cousin, the scotch bonnet, of the genus Capsicum chinensis, are the hottest peppers, regularly tipping the Scoville scale between 80,000-300,000 units, as compared to 500-1,000 for an anaheim, and
2,500-5,000 for a jalapeņo. A 1994 red savina habaņero measured in at 577,000 according to 1995's "Chile Pepper Magazine." We learned all this from an article on Brian's Belly. At the Redwood City Seed Co., we read about Craig Dremann's alternative scale, which rates the hotness of chiles based on how many ounces of salsa you can "heat" with one ounce of pepper pods. The Dremanns are vendors of open-pollinated, hard-to-find seed varieties, and offer the tepin, a tiny, wild-growing Mexican desert perennial, with three times the heat of the habaņeros. Bear in mind that dried pods are many times hotter than fresh, and that red fruit
is hotter than green. And whatever you do when eating peppers, keep your fingers away from your eyes.
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