Did you know... What is the hottest chili in the world?

Chili power is expressed on the Scoville Organoleptic Scale, which basically tell you how many times a hot substance needs to be diluted with pure water till people don't feel any trace of heat in it. Evaluation was once carried out by actual dilution and tasting, with a known-strength solution of capsaicin (the substance that makes chilies hot) used as a standard. Nowadays, chili heat is assessed by objective and accurate chemical procedures (liquid chromatography), but the result is still expressed on the Scoville scale.

Bell peppers and other sweet peppers score 0 Scoville points. Jalapeños score a couple of thousand, while most of the "hot" chili peppers used in cookery are somewhere between ten thousand and a hundred thousand Scoville units.

For a long time the official world recorder used to be the Red Savina habanero chili, the best crops of which got over five hundred thousand points on the Scoville scale. (Habaneros are normally in the 200 to 400 thousand range.) In the early 2000's news began to shock the international community of chili heads about an atomic chili from Northeast-India that had hit and exceeded the one million point barrier, that is, topped the official record by almost 100%.

Many people - especially the producer and trademark owner for the Red Savina - suspected a hoax at first, but over the next few years tests were repeated at other laboratories, and seeds of the Assamese chili were raised in other parts of the world - usually yielding 800 thousand to 1 million points of heat. The latest record batch actually scored over 1.5 million, or three times the former world record. For comparison, pepper sprays used as a defence weapon are in the 2 to 5 million Scoville points range, and pure capsaicin extract - the absolute top of the scale - is 16 million points. There were actually some rumours that the selection of these fiery peppers (or even their "creation" by genetic manipulation techniques) had been sponsored by the Indian Defence Ministry

These famous chilis have quite a few names that vary according to the region they come from and the local dialect there. Recently growers seem to be attempting to classify slightly different cultivars, so these names may not be synonymous much longer. The most common names are naga morich and naga jolokia. The word naga (nāga) means snake, particularly cobra (or a mythical serpent-creature) in Sanskrit, and is used in almost all Indian languages in some form, though most of the modern languages drop the final short a, so for example in Hindi the word is nāg. Naga is also the name of a warlike tribe in the north-eastern region of India, after whom the state of Nagaland had been named. Morich is said to mean pepper or chili, and is clearly a relative of the Sanskrit word marica, which means pepper (peppercorns, originally, but also used for chilies in later days); its equivalent in Hindi is mirc. Jolokia is said to be Assamese for pepper or chili or both; I don't speak Assamese so I cannot tell you its accurate transliteration, but the one film clip I saw about these peppers with an Indian (probably Assamese) narrator who presumably knew how to pronounce it said something like jolokyā (with the o-s pronounced short).

Other names of our chili or its close relatives are bhut jolokia and bih jolokia. The former means 'ghost chili', and the Hindi equivalent of the word is bhūt, 'ghost' (from Sanskrit bhūta). The latter is said to mean 'poison chili', and the word bih may be related to Hindi viṣ (Sanskrit viṣa), 'poison', as b and v are interchangeable in many Indian languages, and Sanskrit ṣ becomes h in some dialects.

Naga morich is said to occur wild as well as in cultivation, and apparently it thrives in the moist and relatively cool climate of the North-East, and its heat drops if grown in the drier and warmer Indian plains. However, an English variety called Dorset Naga has already been produced.

The film clip I mentioned above involved a record attempt by a young Assamese woman who ate sixty of these chilies in two minutes and even touched a broken chili to her open eyes. If you ever come across the naga, don't try this at home. One cook suggests that to spice your dishes with this pepper, you don't actually put it in the food, just touch it softly with the whole pod. A recipe says you could use four such peppers (plus lots of tomato puree or whatever) to make three average bottles of hot-as-hell chili sauce.

Source: just believe me :)

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