Hottest chilli

Mathur et al. (2000), in their search for the hottest chilli variety in India, identified the Tezpur cultivar (C. frutescens var. nagahari) as having the highest amounts... 

SHU (Scoville heat units), which is the hottest chilli known to date (see below). 

The pungency of chilli is measured in multiples of 100 units, from the bell pepper at zero Scoville units to the incendiary Habanero at 300,000 Scoville units. One part of chilli heat per 1,000,000 drops of water rates as only 1.5 Scoville units. The substance that makes a chilli so hot is capsaicin. Pure capsaicin rates over 15,000,000 Scoville units The Red Savina Habanero has been tested at over 577,000 Scoville units (Padilla and Yahia, 1998). Tiwari et al. (2005) identified the hottest chilli variety in the world. A special variety of chilli, Nagarhari, grown in Tezpur (Assam) has been found to possess a pungency of... 

Tiwari, A., Kaushik, M.P., Pandey, K.S. and Dangi, R.S. (2005) Adaptability and production of hottest chilli variety under Gwalior agroclimatic conditions. Current Science 88(10), 1545-1546. 

Beyond its role as a painkiller, capsaicin has other benefits. It speeds up metabolism and lowers cholesterol levels, whilst it has antibacterial properties that may protect against peptic ulcers by killing the bacterium Helicobacter pylori which causes them. Chilli pepper s popularity in hot countries may in part be due to its ability to destroy bacteria of the kind that can cause food to go bad and this seems to be borne out by the fact that the countries with the spiciest cuisines are the hottest ones, namely Thailand, the Philippines, India and Malaysia, while those which use the least are the coldest, namely Norway, Sweden and Finland. 

Hotness scale in the scale devised to relate the hotness of spices, a value on the arbitrary scale ranging from 0 to 10, vanilla scores 1. Generally, most spices fall in the middle, with only the hottest of Mexican chillies scoring 9 or 10. 

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