And now, in 2013, a majority of Americans are saying they prefer hot or spicy foods. Red Robin has even introduced a new line of sandwiches and burgers dressed with habanero sauce, called island fire, in addition to their burger that features a scorching ghost pepper sauce. Ketchup is also getting hotter with the release of Heinz’s Hot & Spicy Ketchup. As for Sriracha hot chili sauce, the brand sold over 20 million bottles just last year. Spicy food is also appearing almost 15% more on menus from 2010. While that may not sound like something people would want to put anywhere near their mouths, taste buds apparently can’t get enough as the super hot pepper business continues to get even hotter which has now become one of America’s fastest=growing industries. Currie’s Carolina Reaper chili pepper has even showed to have similar chemical composition to pepper spray. Since the growth of his business, he has trademarked his brand “Smoking Ed’s Carolina Reaper.” which gives him the sole right to phrase that on his sales of peppers and seeds. “I pretty much work on peppers all the time, when I look at my children, I see peppers.” Currie has stated. This year alone, Currie will harvest around 17 million Carolina Reaper peppers right on his own land in South Carolina and could stand to make as much as $1 million from selling the pepper seeds and making paste out of the peppers that he then sells to hot sauce companies. The proof came from tests conducted at Winthrop’s lab which tested how hot the pepper is. Ed Currie paid $12,000 in order to obtain the information he needed to supply Guinness with to claim the record. These Scoville Units measure the capsaicin content in the peppers. The scale has a number rating in Scoville Heat Units (or SHUs). The Carolina Reaper was deemed as the world’s hottest chili pepper in 2012 by the Guinness World Records, surpassing the previous record holder the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. The Scoville Scale was developed as a way to measure the spiciness of chili peppers. It has a number of culinary uses with sauces, seeds, and peppers being fairly easy to come by. The Carolina Reaper, which is a hybrid chili pepper, is apart of the Capsicum chinense species having originally been called “HP22B” by it’s creator Ed Currie, owner and runner of the PuckerButt Pepper Company which is located in Fort Mill, South Carolina. In other words, it’s a pepper that’s a 100 times hotter than a Jalapeno. The Carolina Reaper, now famously known as the world’s hottest chili pepper, averages 1,569,300 SHU on the Scoville Scale with levels that even peak over 2,200,000 SHU. People develop a tolerance for them, and they want something more.The Hottest Pepper In the World The Carolina Reaper "People start with sauces like Tabasco, and they are good sauces, but they aren't really hot. "For the general public, is a condiment," Currie said, when we spoke to him in 2018. He goes by Smokin' Ed, and he describes himself as owner, president, mad scientist and chef at PuckerButt Pepper Company in South Carolina. Which brings us to these questions: Why this pursuit of developing hotter and hotter peppers? And who is eating them?įor answers, it makes sense to go to the man responsible for developing both Pepper X and The Smokin' Ed Carolina Reaper (that's a trademarked name, by the way): Ed Currie. It took 10 years to develop as of 2020, Guinness World Records (which had earlier crowned the Carolina Reaper as the hottest pepper) had not yet confirmed that Pepper X was now the hottest pepper. In 2017, a new pepper, known only as Pepper X came on the scene, rating about 3.2 million Scoville units. Carolina Reapers rate 2.2 million on the Scoville heat scale. That honor officially belongs to the Carolina Reaper, which earned its title as the hottest pepper in the world - beating out a pepper called the Trinidad Scorpion - in 2013. To put things in perspective, that's at least 100 times hotter than a jalapeño, which ranks anywhere between about 2,500 and 8,000 Scoville units.īut ghost peppers aren't even the hottest. Ghost peppers, for those of you that don't know, are some of the hottest in the world and rate 1 million per pepper on the Scoville heat scale (a scientific measure of how hot a pepper is). For instance, in May 2017, a competitive eater who goes by the name LA Beast set a Guinness World Record for eating the most ghost peppers in two minutes - 13. You may have seen one of those crazed contests on YouTube or at a fair where people "compete" to eat as many hot peppers as possible. There are several different types of people who are attracted to eating super-hot peppers.
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