This is the hottest pepper in the world. It doesn't just burn your throat, but your entire body
Do you think a jalapeño pepper is spicy? Well, that's really just a simple game. Another pepper, the one that took first place on the spiciness podium in 2023, is even 1300 times more powerful than it. It dethroned the famous Carolina Reaper. Would you dare to try it?
3:16 PM EDT, October 23, 2023
This pepper is not a toy. It's spiciness is so potent that few would dare to try it. Interestingly, its inventor insists that one can detect notes of... cinnamon and chocolate. It's not the only surprising fact about the current leader of the world's spiciest pepper ranking — Pepper X.
Creativity without borders
Wilbur Lincoln Scoville, an American chemist living at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, developed an organoleptic test - better known as the "Scoville Scale", which allowed for measuring the spiciness of various types of chili peppers. If good old Wilbur could see today how much his research has evolved, he would probably be bursting with pride.
According to the aforementioned Scoville scale, we rate the spiciness of different dishes and spices, with chili obviously at the forefront. In this way, we find that popular jalapeño has a score of approximately 2,500 units on the index, habanero - 100,000, and the infamous, incredibly spicy Carolina Reaper (cultivated in 2017 by Ed Currie) - up to 2 million units. However, the current record holder is no longer the "Reaper from Carolina" — its place in the Guinness Book of Records has been taken by Pepper X.
The hottest pepper in the world has a taste of cinnamon and chocolate
Ed Currie, the creator of Pepper X, is the same spice lover who previously created the Carolina Reaper. There is a big difference between the peppers he bred. First, they are separated by 500 thousand to several million units on the Scoville scale. Second, according to Currie, Pepper X doesn't burn the throat in the way the Carolina Reaper does, but tastes sweet. The feeling of "burning in the body" is only felt after a while. Currie said this about it:
You can make a product very spicy, but if it tastes disgusting, there's nothing you can do with it. The second factor is always the quest for flavor. Firstly, we thought about increasing the spiciness level, then it was supposed to have flavor
There is a lot of truth in Currie's words. After all, if it were just about spiciness, instead of chili peppers we could try, for example, pepper spray. Doesn't sound too appealing, does it? And certainly not as much as a note of spiciness, sweetness, chocolate, and cinnamon all in one. Despite this, we're not in a hurry to test Pepper X...
