Why the World's Hottest Peppers Are Worth a Go

Hot peppers… but not as hot as they get. Photo credit: Corbis

They’re coughing and crying, squirming and seething, and chugging full-fat milk to ease the pain. They’re male and female, adults and kids… and they’re eating some of the hottest peppers on earth.

The experience looks far from pleasant, and smack-dab painful for some. So why do so many people indulge in the horrendously hot hobby?

"We have this culture where everything goes to the extreme. How big a burger can you eat? How extreme of a jump can you do? We’re an adrenaline, Red Bull type of society. This fits right in there," Dave Hirschkop, founder of Dave’s Gourmet, Inc., which sells 16 kinds of hot sauces, tells us.

To understand just how hot these chili peppers truly are, one simply needs to refer to something called the Scoville scale, a scientific measurement system invented a little more than a century ago by pharmacist Wilbur Scoville. The formula measures the concentration of capsaicin, the compound that not only gives peppers their heat, but which is also responsible for giving pepper fanatics a sense of euphoria. (More on that in a minute.)

A jalapeño pepper, for example, ranges from 2,500 to 10,000 units, while original Tabasco sauce tops out at 5,000. The infamous Bhut Jolokia, better known as the ghost pepper (by far the most popular of the over-the-top peppers, and one that once held the title of the hottest pepper on the planet), comes in at around 1 million units. Meanwhile, the not-as-mainstream Carolina Reaper pepper, which Guinness officially named the world’s hottest pepper last year, tops the chart with a scorching 1.569 million-unit average.

Ed Currie, president and founder of the PuckerButt Pepper Company – who cultivates 1,100 types of peppers on his South Carolina farm – developed the Reaper more than a decade ago by cross-pollinating the fiery Pakistani naga with a strain of habanero from the Caribbean. He knew it was a keeper when “everybody who tried it got violently ill except for me and one other guy” and put it out to market a few years later. Since receiving the Guinness title, he now receives 200 to 300 requests for raw peppers daily from around the world. His company’s No. 1 selling product is the (grimly named) Reaper Sauce, which goes for $25 for a 5-ounce bottle.

Why do people, well, go there? "There are those who are in it for the rush, and those who are in it for the dare. Some people just want to eat the hottest thing in the world," Currie says.

And even though most Americans don’t want to eat the hottest thing in the world, more and more of us are eating hotter foods than ever before, a phenomenon Currie attributes to the influx of immigrants from Africa and Asia (where the hottest peppers in the world are grown), who have helped make spicy foods mainstream. “Twenty years ago it wasn’t easy to get Thai food in most cities,” says Currie. “Now [Thai restaurants are] on every block, our American palate is changing.”

So yes, we like the thrill and dig the heat. But we also like the buzz. “When you cause pain, it releases endorphins, explains Alan R. Hirsch, M.D., director of the Chicago-based Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation. “So the capsaicin in peppers hot peppers causes the release of endorphins on the tongue that creates a mini-euphoric sensation,”

Blogs and bulletin boards around the Web are full of stories and tips on getting that pepper high, and some hot sauces are marketing themselves as providing that rush.

But for every new pepper that hits the market, each one hotter than the last (Currie, for his part, is already on working on a version that he says will usurp the hottest title from his own Reaper), a little of the excitement fades over time, says Hirschkop. There’s always a newer, hotter pepper on the block.

When Dave’s Insanity Sauce hit the market more than two decades ago, it became the hottest on the market because it used pure pepper extract. (At the time the simple Habanero was the hottest out there.) It was eventually beaten out by one called the Red Savina and, later, the now-famous ghost pepper.

"The ghost pepper got a lot of press because things hadn’t changed in years," says Hirschkop. ”But in the last few years, there’s been a lot of one-upmanship,” he explains. Everything is sort of muddled now. We have to pace ourselves. Every time someone says they have the new hottest thing, we’d be making a new hot sauce every month.”

And plenty of pepper-obsessed Americans would be happy to try it.