Is this sauce hot enough for you?

Posted on June 18, 2007
Filed Under Food |

Hot sauceIf you ever wanted to prove your machismo, then just sprinkle your dinner with the hottest sauce you can find and then eat it without breaking a sweat. But before you rush off to the local restaurant to try this stunt, you better know how to measure the hotness of a sauce and what your limits are. Hot sauces have some seriously creative names such as Molten Golden, Queen of Farts, Rock Your World, Larynx Lava and Wet Fart; but if you don’t want to choose based on the name (since you would always select Wet Fart) how do you know which sauce is the best choice?

The hotness of sauce is measured in Scoville Units (SHU.) It is a count of the number of sugar water drops required to completely neutralize the flavor of a drop of hot sauce. In case you are wondering how it got such a strange name, then know that the unit is named after its inventor Wilbur Scoville.

Your average, run of the mill, Tabasco sauce probably is at around 2-3,000 SHUs. Even your grandmother can enjoy that comfortably and so you probably can’t impress anyone with it. By the way, pepper spray used for self defense and to subdue bad boyfriends is 2,000,000-5,000,000 SHUs. In terms of sauce, forget about Tabasco and consider grasping one that is over 10,000 SHUs but less than 50,000. Taste it using a prick of a pin before you dive in.

If you are brave or crazy enough to go higher than that then Taste: the 4th sense store will sell you a hot sauce called “The Legend” from Cajohns of Columbus, Ohio, a pure blend of red savina habanero pepper that weighs in at 577,000 SHUs. By the way, the store won’t sell it to you unless you first sign a waiver stating that you are of age and not drunk! Apparently, the same store also sells a new sauce that is a pure reduction of capsaicin, a chili pepper’s active heat-yielding ingredient measuring an insane 7.1 million SHUs. I would stay away from this one unless it somehow makes its way on your “10 things to do before I die” list; and even then, make sure it is the last item on the list!

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