The Mildest And Hottest Peppers Available That You Can Eat

There is a pepper for everyone. Whether you like them mild enough to snack on at lunchtime or spicy enough to leave you gasping for a swig of milk, peppers come in a wide range of spice levels that can fit anyone's tolerance. At the bottom of the Scoville scale is the bell pepper, coming in at a whopping 0 Scoville Heat Units (or SHU, the Scoville scale's unit of measurement for spice) due to its complete lack of capsaicin (which is the irritant that makes peppers so spicy). Instead of providing spice like the rest of the scale, bell peppers are a sweet treat that are not attempting to ward off insects like its spicy counterparts. Bell peppers come in a multitude of colors and can be enjoyed by anyone, no matter their level of spice tolerance.

Not many people have made themselves acquainted with the peppers that top the Scoville scale, and most have never had the opportunity to test their spice level by eating the blood-red Carolina Reaper. This monstrosity, the devilish offspring of a La Soufrière pepper and a Naga Viper pepper, was created by hot pepper breeder "Smokin'" Ed Currie and held the record as the World's Hottest Pepper from 2013 to 2023. To put the Carolina Reaper's heat into perspective, it sports 2.2 million SHU. A jalapeño? 2,000 to 8,000 SHU.

However, the Carolina Reaper was recently beat for the number one spot by another Currie concoction: Pepper X. Guinness World Records officially awarded Pepper X with the World's Hottest Pepper title in October 2023, and Currie is one of the few brave enough to face his own creation. The average Pepper X pepper's spiciness is around 2.693 million SHU, and even its breeder couldn't take the heat, as Currie told Scientific American, he needed six hours to recover from the cramps. And Currie has great news for spice fanatics: He says that they will go even hotter in the future.

But how exactly does the Scoville scale work? It was actually created by pharmacologist Wilbur Scoville in 1912 in an attempt to improve painkilling cream. To craft the scale, he analyzed the pungency of the pepper along with its amount of capsaicin and tried to find the pepper with the highest capsaicin content, since it can also be used as a topical pain reliever. The most mild peppers appearing on the Scoville scale are in the Capsicum annuum species, home to a multitude of different spice levels ranging from mild to hot. The spicier counterparts (including the Carolina Reaper) are found in the Capsicum chinense family, while those which are less often cultivated fall into the Capsicum frutescens species. Each pepper is measured in the aforementioned Scoville Heat Units, ranging from 0 SHU to the current reigning champ's 2.6 million SHU.

However, Scoville's method is pretty outdated. Today, high-performance liquid chromatography is the more updated way to measure a pepper's spice level. The test separates the components of a mixture and is often used for pharmaceuticals, as it is a much more sophisticated test based in science compared to Scoville's subjective test. Scoville rated each pepper by giving a panel of taste testers progressively diluted pepper water until they couldn't taste the spice. Not only is each person's concept of heat very unique, but no two peppers are exactly the same. So while many may agree on the rankings given to each pepper on the Scoville scale, it should still be taken as an opinion-based chart and not fact.