How Hot Is Your Chili Pepper?

Tears spring to your eyes at the slightest bit of sambal. So hot! But exactly how hot is that jalapeño or cayenne pepper? Spoiler: compared with other types of pepper, it’s not too bad. We’ll explain.

Helpful: chemist Wilbur Scoville worked it out precisely at the beginning of the last century. To determine how hot peppers are, he diluted each variety with sugar water. Each time, he checked how much of that water was needed to stop tasting the pepper’s spicy flavor. The numbers (expressed in SHU) on his scale show how many times you need to dilute it with water. In the case of cayenne pepper, about forty thousand times.

The average Dutch person…
… already considers 500 to 1,000 SHU spicy. If you look at Scoville’s scale, that is a low number. Sambal oelek scores 2,000 SHU, easily double (or quadruple) that.

Also read:

• This is why we eat spicy food even though it hurts
• It has been researched: how spicy you like your food says a lot about your personality
• Recipe: Spicy cheese balls