Brits unleash world's hottest chilli pepper
A British firm has claimed the world's hottest chilli pepper crown, a fearsome beast clocking 1,176,182 on the Scoville scale. Fire Foods of Lincolnshire is responsible for cultivating the Infinity Chilli, which tests at Warwick University confirmed as the planet's most potent. The previous record holder is the bhut jolokia, …
Yes, yes, yes
because I'm the sort of nutter that eats corned beef sandwiches liberally doused in the hottest chilli sauce I can get my hands on. My mouth is genuinely watering now thinking about it...
Bring it on!
/flames for obvious reasons
What's the point?
It's just macho posturing. Nobody could eat them raw so why bother breeding them hotter and hotter?
It's just like those increasingly hoppy beers a lot of American microbrewers seem to be competing on. Who, other than a total brewing geek, actually cares? Likewise who cares how hot a chili pepper is if it's too hot to eat?
What's the point? Simple...
Just for a moment, imagine you're responsible for buying raw materials in a commercial food producer's factory. You need chilli and you have two products to choose from: 'normal' chilli - or this. Both cost about the same & both are in powdered form. You'll be quids in with the higher concentration, clearly.
Trouble is, if you /did/ get a bottle of this for home use, I think it'd be a challenge to measure out anything like the 'right' quantity 'cause it's so damn concentrated. I certainly won't be coming 'round to sample your spicy little number!
Why Paris? Another hot little numbe... oh, forget it ;-)
Come on..
Not many people actually eat raw chillis? The few that do, I'll agree are mostly doing the macho thing. In which case, I'd love to be around when someone handed them one of these. I seriously doubt it would be possible to eat a raw one.
For those of us who enjoy heavily spiced foods, the heat isn't really the attraction. Once you get used to it, the heat diminishes, and the flavour of the chilli comes out. You might just taste hot, I taste a whole range of flavours under the heat.
It's far more than just AAAARGH it's HOTTTT...... And most certainly is not a macho "who can take the most pain" thing. If it hurts, you used too much. If you get an enjoyable tingle, then you have found the right level of heat for you.
Sauce? Wimps!
Give us the chillis so we can cook some treats for ourselves!
Nothing beats mixing chopped Dorset Naga and Bird's Eye chillis, some normal red and green peppers with leaf salad, chuck in some grated cheese and little cous-cous and BLAM! The salad has zero ability to absorb the spice and nothing beats a good excuse to drink copious amounts of ice cold beer trying to reduce the burning that ensues from both ends!
Don't forget to wash your hands before going to the little boys room too...
Paris - She can kiss it better.
Paris....
Which end do you want kissed better? One costs more than the other.
wimp
Grated cheese?
Dairy products reduce the effects of chilli.
@Wize
Oh you're not wrong there. You make that mistake exactly ONCE in your life, I can assure you. Got the most disgusted look from the missus when I came screaming into the kitchen and ruined a pint of milk...
I, too, can attest to this
Shared a house once with 3 mates and a young lady who was romantically attached (in a semi-transient way) to one of the males (Ron) who was absent when we discussing (over a few beers) methods of maintaining male sexual arousal. Someone suggested a mixture of chilli powder & honey smeared over the male member.
A couple of nights later I'm sat on the bog when I hear a scream, the bog door caves in and Ron leaps in the bath sticking his appendage under the cold water tap.
Says a lot about her intellect.
Re: I, too, can attest to this
It seems to say more about his intellect.
Re: I, too, can attest to this
1. He claims that, as far as he knew, it was honey (without additives).
2. Where was she planning on putting smeared appendage? What would the effect on her be?
Dairy produce
Why, is Paris lactating then? ;-)
I have to go to work.
@AC
Maybe, she assumed that "maintaining male arousal" was the same as "delaying his big finish". In her defence, it certainly delayed it - I imagine it was delayed by several days.
Terrorist weapon!
And in theory, it would be possible to take a bottle of this on the plane as long as it was in a 100ml bottle, right? Wouldn't it practically eat through the fuselage?? Definitely disable the crew and allow a would-be hijacker or terrorist to take control!
I know your trying to be funny...
... but please just dont. Some braindead troglodyte from the Home Office or Homeland Security Department might read this, and suddenly any and ALL liquids will be banned from flights and we will end up with an even more insanely stupid amount of security theatre at every airport then we already have...
Be serious
Oh come on. There are many different liquids, a small bottle of which could kill everyone on a plane. Hot chilli sauce is not one of them. Not even MegaScoville hot chilli sauce.
Beer - the antidote.
Why?
I mean seriously? I like hot food every now and then and I understand that the spicier the chilli the more endorphins released. But there has to be a law of diminishing returns associated with this. Developing something so hot that it will kill a horse at ten paces just seems mental - they're going to have to water it down before it goes to market, so seriously why spend the time and money on developing ever hotter chillis?
Or is it just a dick waving contest?
Because they can?
A lot of things in life appear to be fairly "pointless" but if we stopped doing them we'd only be left with boring practical stuff to do. I certainly wouldn't want to live in a world like that.
totally
a dick waving contest, have already passed it to the usual suspects when it comes to public cock brandishing in the office.
hand grenade, because your arse is going to look like you tried to smuggle one with the pin out >.<
I've had a jolokia chilli
I was sick the whole evening afterwards. It really was blistering.
So I'll give this one a miss I think.
Consider this icon-
to be upside down, in a small tiled room.
Ultimate ring stinger.
Put some bog rolls in the fridge and pass me a bottle of that sauce.
Icon, DUH...
Scotch Bonnet
are around the right level at 35k on the scoville.
I thought they were closer to
250,000
(post must contain letters......ABC)
Homeopathy in action?
> The final figure awarded represents the dilution required to kill the pepper's "heat", so the Infinity Chilli capsaicin must be "watered down" by a factor of 1,176,182 before it loses its effect.
The accuracy of this dilution looks extremely suspicious, being that at which five testers cannot detect the pepper taste. Are they seriously suggestion that they can taste it to one part in over a million? The figure isn't even a power of 2!
What's so special about 2?
"The figure isn't even a power of 2!"
Why should it be a power of 2? If I was performing dilutions and I knew I'd have to go for over 1,000,000; I wouldn't dilute by factors of 2. I'd use a dilution of 99:1, three times. After that, I'd titrate a sample with dilutant and stop diluting when the testers reported no taste. After that, you note the final amount of dilutant and out pops your number.
I agree that the 'resolution' of the dilution is silly. Its accuracy is a different matter. The major contributor to uncertainty would be the preparation of the original source material; that is where any serious inaccuracy would most likely be introduced.
Right idea, wrong direction
@frank ly:
The problem with your method might be that tasting chilli probably reduces your ability to detect it in the short term. Better to start with an undetectable solution and gradually increase the concentration.
They probably didn't actually do it that way
More often nowadays they use chromatography and convert it to an approximate Scoville heat unit value.
The point of that
Totally escapes me...
Clearly, it cannot be used for any culinary purposes as you won't be able to taste any food for a considerable period of time after you try any of that "pepper".
Some kind of sex aid for masochists?
Ah. But does it beat...
The Guatamalan Insanity Pepper grown by inmates of a lunatic asylum and hot enough to melt icecream before it touches your tongue?
as withnail would say:
BALLS! I'll swallow it and have a mile of runs
Significant figures - what they?
1,176,182 ? Yeah, right. That factors as 2 x 7 x 29 x 2897.
We're expected to believe that somebody diluted something 29 times, and then 2897 times?
Not how many times
It's the ratio.
If you guess it right you need only to dilute it twice - once in concentration 1,176,181:1 and again by adding another drop of solvent.
Dodgy scale
They need a new scale and method I reckon.
This dilution business sounds a lot like homeopathy! :D
Dilution factors?
the factoring is very close to 99 x 99 x 120
but there the preparation steps may account for strange factors.
[eg in sugar factories, there's a test where 100 ml of liquid is clarified with 10ml of lead acetate solution giving a 1.1 factor in the calculations. ]
Ah, but...
if you do it backwards, 2897 x 29 x 7 x 2 it makes a lot more sense, do it by a lage amount and the decreasingly smaller amounts. Though personally i'd do it by an even bigger factor (i.e the current record holders factor) then increase the factor by increments of 1.x.
For the naysayers amongst you...
I think there is certainly an element of hotter chillis becoming a pissing contest. However it is more than possible to cook perfectly palatable foods with (from personal experience) a chilli as strong as a Dorset Naga.
That said I have never eaten raw, a chilli hotter than Birds Eye/Scotch Bonnet and would not have the balls to try anything hotter. But if you want to see a mental Aussie doing so, go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR7jvw9W-TQ
I ate a chilli...now I can see through time....
My neighbour grows chilis and had a bhut jolokia, it could burn your skin if you handled it too long..... OMFG.
He put it on a string, dunked it in soup (sploosh, up down, up down, out) and binned it. The soup was a killer, I'd have wiped my mouth out with a vindaloo to get rid of the burning if it helped.
As for the "why bother" crowd....because we're English and we can, and some idiot somewhere will want to try it. I'd like to put my name forward as that idiot please.
That's it, the one with the burning ring of fire falling out the bottom......
Capsaicin
You want burnt skin? The NHS have got me rubbing capsaicin creme into my skin 4 times a day.
There's lots of tricks you can use to reduce the burning, but it'll stop the treatment doing what it should.
Don't even get me started on how hard it is to get the (invisible) oils off your hand. NEVER go to the toilet within 2 hours of an application. Trust me!
To start with it was OK, then it was like bad sunburn all the time, now it's not quite so bad as it's largely destroyed the nerves. Might even get to stop applying it before christmas.
@Ben Tasker
Dude, you seriously have to tell us what's wrong with you to cause a doctor to prescribe groin-maming chilli cream as a cure. Or have you volunteered for some kind of experiment?
Money
As I understand it the point for a lot of the violently hot chillies is not how much dilution before you can't taste it in suger water but how much before you can't taste is in a batch of supermarket own brand curry. The dorset naga is mostly sold seed stock I believe.
I could also be talking rubbish of course.
50p goes to
The first person to rub their privates with this sauce and post the aftermath video up on YouTube.
Time...
...to invest in a tanker of lassi and put the bog roll in the freezer methinks.
Nom nom nom! Bring it on!
Hang on... my mind has just wandered to what might happen if one were to, for example, nip for a swift toilet break following the careless preparation of these beasties. Doesn't bear thinking about. *Shudder!*
Killer Chilli
I am a great fan of chilli which 'makes your eyes bleed' but it's a delicate art of flavouring balanced against battery acid to have something actually edible and enjoyable. At some point it simply becomes ridiculous and perhaps even dangerous.
I suppose if it does make your dick drop off it will be easier to wave around :-)
