Did you know your ability to handle heat can be scaled? According to the Scoville Scale, every chilli pepper is scored to represent how spicy it is.
What is the Scoville Scale?
The Scoville Scale and Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) were named after scientist Wilbur Scoville in 1912. He developed a test called the “Scoville Organoleptic Test”, which is used to measure a chili pepper’s pungency and heat.
Scoville ground up peppers and mixed them with sugar water. He tested them with a group of tasters who sipped the sugar-water-pepper solutions. The solutions are then diluted bit by bit until they no longer burned the tongues of the tasters. A number was assigned to the chili pepper based on the number of dilutions needed to kill the heat.
The hotness of a chili pepper starts at 15 and goes up to 16,000,000 Scoville heat units, which is incredibly HOT! This scale is also used to measure anything made from chili peppers, such as hot sauce. It measures the concentration of “capsaicin”, the active ingredient that produces the sensation of heat on our tongues.
We scored our products on the Scoville Scale. See where your favourite hot sauce scores:
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