Your tongue tingles on the tip as you take your first bite of Pepper X, and maybe you’ll even smile, thinking that you’ve got yourself just another normal spicy dish. But then it slides down deeper, until the back of your throat are burning and your chest and turning your stomach inside out and beads of sweat form on your forehead. That’s what it’s like to eat Pepper X, currently the world’s hottest chili pepper according to Guinness World Records.
Produced by Ed Currie in South Carolina, the red pepper officialy measures 3,180,000 Scoville Heat Units. It took him a decade of secret breeding experiments to get there: To create such an insanely hot pepper, he used Carolina Reapers and cross-pollinated them with various other hybrids, pushing human tolerance to it’s limit.
What Is Pepper X?
But if you want to see what’s realy going on with the heat, you’ve got to cut through the numbers. So here’s the chart showing the breakdown of the visual comparisons for Pepper X and its ancestors. It also tells the story of a decade where our progress have been made: The thing is, all this heat isn’t about reaching a particular number, as much as the length of time you’re feeling it, since capsaicin sticks to your mouth’s pain receptors.
Your brain gets alerted by these pain sensors and think there’s a false alarm, prompting a signal telling you “oh shit, it’s hot.” With typical hot peppers, relief comes via milk or other dairy items because they pull the oil off the receptors; in Pepper X, though, the density is so thick that the relief only last a few seconds before it hits again. It is a chemical siege, not a simple jolt of spice.
When most folks hear ‘spicy’, they think ‘hotter is better.’ That’s not at all what spice is about. As the diagram shows, there is an enormous distance from say, a typical Jalapeño, to these super-hots, somewhere around six hundred times more hotness. A droplet of Pepper X will blow your socks off. A couple drops? Forget about it. There is no doubling up here.
It is partly about psychology (preparing yourself for the experience), combined with an almost extreme level of care. For a decade-plus, Ed Currie worked to refine this pepper, breeding for maximum capsaicin concentration while maintaining physical structure of the fruit itself. The outcome is a lumpy, puckered pepper that may seem harmless on the surface, but its appearance alone tell you exactly what it is.
There’s something sad about the tale of ever-hotter peppers setting world records: In the past two decades, you needed to be roughly twice as hot than the incumbent king to even get noticed. Pepper X broke that pattern by nearly doubling the old mean score, putting itself squarely in the ultra-spicy camp where “really spicy” fades into “this is physically overwhelming.
You don’t go for it because it will challenge your palate: It’s a medical condition in waiting. Even pepper pros say they still hiccup and shake and feel queasy for hours afterwards, and no amount of water help. So what’s it taste like? Where should someone new to this pepper begin? Start with a drop of sauce (or extract) on something hearty such as rice or a piece of bread. Don’t put much on at once and don’t ever attempt to eat one whole. Have some dairy around, that will help lessen any fallout, although it won’t prevent it.
And remember: while the Scoville scale measures things linearly, its sensation is exponentially increasing. It’s nice and breezy from mild to medium; then it’s like entering a blast furnace from medium to super-hot. Which is why it’s all about the context rather than the number. The infographic does an excellent job illustrating that point, how rapidly your well-known peppers becomes unimportant against the new extremes.
Pepper X isn’t about flavor, it’s about pushing your body beyond its limits. It’s like the ultimate boss battle in the world of hot sauce making: You don’t chomp down on this thing simply to taste something delicious, you consume it to declare yourself a survivor of the heat. That evolution from bell pepper to its hottest point tells the story of just how far man has driven agriculture into extreme areas.
We’ve escaped whatever the “default” setting was for nature, now we’re engineering our own peppers with levels of spicy that border on chemical warfare. So when you spot that three-million Scoville number, know that it represents years of science, sweat, and a whole lot of pain receptors begging for mercy. And that’s where we are today: Red-hot, at the end of the line, but ready to challenge whoever dares bite.