Interpreting The Scoville Scale

How hot is that hot sauce? Probably somewhere in between 1,000 and 5,300,000 scoville units. Doesn’t tell you much, I’m not surprised unless you are a hot sauce connoisseur or just a little masochistic you don’t have much of a reason to need to rate your hot sauce.

The Scoville heat scale does have an interesting history and has become the standard unit of measurement to rate piquancy, which is simply a measure of capsaician in a chili pepper. The scale was invented by Wilbur Scoville a pharmacist in 1912. There is a fine line between capsaician and pharmaceuticals so it is appropriate that the scale was invented by a pharmacist.

Scientist of the time looked down there nose at the subjectivity of the Scoville test because he used people to rate the hotness of his test specimens. A panel of 5 judges would taste a rate a predetermined amount of capsaician diluted with sugar water. The amount of sugar water that it took to dilute the spice would correspond to the Scoville rating. No more than 6 taste could be made in an 8 hour period. This test does seem a little crude at first but when you consider that the tongue is sensitive to less than a millionth of a grain of capsaicin it develops some validity and you also develop some more respect for the tongue.

There is however a fair amount of variation between tasters an a wide variation of piquancy within a particular variety of chili. People also develop a resistance to capsaicin over time so the effectiveness of tasters could diminish as they gain more experience. For these reasons today the amount of heat producing chemicals is measured mechanically and a rating is given by the American Spice Trade Association, but this rating is usually translated into Scoville units because of its wide acceptance.

A couple interesting facts about the Scoville scale or peppers in general are that when peppers are dehydrated they tend to increase in heat by about 10 times. So, watch out next time you see dried peppers in a dish you plan to eat.

The Scoville scale goes up to 16,000,000, which is pure capsaicin, police grade pepper spray is in the neighborhood of 5,000,000 scoville units and a habanero pepper is anywhere from 100,000 to 350,000 units. The scary part is that you can by pure capsaicin and that there are varieties of euphorbia cactus that naturally produce a substance that is hotter than capsaicin called resiniferatoxin. Some companies are experimenting with resiniferatoxin trying to make a better pain killer. Hopefully no hot sauce companies are conducting experiments.