How hot is that chili?
If you like to cook with chili peppers – and so many people do these days, given the popularity of such spicy cuisines as Mexican, Asian, and Caribbean – you’ve probably heard of the Scoville scale. Chile aficionados will brag that their favorite chilies are the hottest, with a scorching 300,000 on the Scoville scale, while that jalapeño you’ve just learned to love only measures a wimpy 4,000. But what exactly do these numbers mean, and how do they translate into useful information? Scoville took the guesswork out of judging chiles. Let’s start with the invention of the Scoville scale, and then we’ll look at how different varieties of chilies rank in this heat hierarchy. In 1912, a man named Wilbur L. Scoville was working for a company that made an ointment for aching joints in which capsaicin, the heat-causing compound in chilies, was an important ingredient. The company was constantly frustrated because the heat level in chilies varied so much. Scoville devised a formal test in which
