When You're Hot, You're REALLY Hot.

Back last March, I reported on my discovery that the title of the World's Hottest Pepper* had been claimed by the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, the heat of which had been rated at 1.464 million Scoville Units ...

This is a pepper which, should you accidentally drop it on the steel deck of a battleship, will quickly melt its way to the bilge, boil whatever water is there, continue on its merry way through the bottom of the hull, and proceed to the bottom of the ocean, where it will fry any fish that comes to investigate. This is, in short, a seriously hot pepper.

But records are made to be broken, and so it is with the World's Hottest Pepper title. According to this article from Yahoo News, an intrepid grower in South Carolina has claimed the honor with his Carolina Reaper peppers, which measure a staggering 1,569,300 Scoville Units, with an individual pepper blazing in at 2.2 million ...

Feel free to try these in your home recipes. Of course, if you do not have asbestos gloves and utensils, a welder's mask, and a death wish, you may wish to just stick with the good old jalapeno**, which is plenty hot enough for most humans.

And won't sink your battleship.

Have a good day. More heated thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* I had been under the impression that the world's hottest Pepper was my high school friend of that name who now lives out in Las Vegas, but I appear to have been mistaken. Well, perhaps not ...

** Between 5,000 and 15,000 Scoville Units.