what makes a chile hot in the first place?
Well, each chile contains a certain amount of capsaicin, a special chemical that activates the nerve endings on your tongue and creates the sensation of heat that is transmitted to your brain. The Scoville unit, or SHU, measures how much capsaicin is present by determining how many squirts of sugar water from a small spray bottle is needed to dilute the capsaicin in a certain pepper to the point that there is no heat at all. For example, a sweet pepper has a Scoville scale reading of zero, since there is no heat at all in this popular pepper. You can test this yourself by taking a small bit of any hot chile and crushing it up then determining how much sugar water it takes to remove the heat from your mouth. But be careful, because Scoville units can range up into the hundreds of thousands when measuring such hot peppers as the habaneros, which regularly rate over three hundred thousand! Of course the Scoville rating is more subjective than scientific, since each pepper will have a cert
