There was a manufacturer who was using 11 55-gallon drums of a pepper in a recipe. You might use two to three pounds of cayenne, whereas with Pepper X, to get the same heat, you would need maybe just an eighth of a gram of dried pepper. Say you're using cayenne to get a pepper sauce as hot as you want it. The advantage of the superhot peppers is economy of scale. What's the advantage of having a superhot pepper? But I ate more peppers for dinner that night. A Reaper usually takes me about half an hour to recover from, including the cramps. I wouldn't recommend eating it raw to anybody, and if somebody wants me to do it again, they're going to have to pay me a lot of money. But raw, the flavor lasts only for a millisecond, and then the heat is just taking off. In hot sauce and in salsa and candy and things, it tastes delicious. It's just playing around and having fun with science. Nine out of 10 crossbreeds that we do go nowhere, and we have no expectation when we start. You can increase the tannin levels in a pepper that is not so hot, such as a scotch bonnet, and it gives you the perception of more heat.įor Pepper X, I took a pepper that had a different set of capsaicinoids and bred it with the Reaper, and it turned out really hot. There are many different capsaicinoids, and these compounds react with a nerve receptor that only mammals have that sends a signal to our brain saying, “This is hot.” There are a lot of other compounds that can enhance the heat or tame the heat.

The compound that makes peppers hot is called capsaicin. They're in the midrange of the pepper world. Don't get me wrong-I eat the superhot ones on a daily basis, but my favorites aren't superhot. It's not very high on the Scoville scale, but it is my absolute favorite pepper to eat. We have a particular variety of chocolate scotch bonnet that we call a UFO bonnet because it kind of looks like UFOs in pictures. What's your favorite weird pepper that you've bred? I like getting peppers to look really weird or breeding out different colors. Ninety-nine percent of what we do is for flavor and looks. When you're breeding peppers, what other attributes might you look for besides heat? Right now I'm making test batches of hot sauce, doing interviews and drying peppers at the same time. We make hot sauce and pepper mash and dried pepper and pepper powder for all sorts of different manufacturers. We're one of the largest hot pepper farms in the U.S. It takes anywhere between eight and 12 generations to stabilize a plant so you can start doing the testing.Īt PuckerButt, we don't just breed peppers. If that comes out the same, that's the first generation. If the resulting fruit has what we're looking for, we take the seeds out and plant them. We cross-pollinate plants that have the attributes we want. The other half of the year we're breeding peppers.

Half the year we're processing peppers by drying them or turning them into pepper paste. What does the day-to-day life of a pepper breeder look like? Most of the people who actually breed peppers aren't on social media. If it were, the Carolina Reaper wouldn't have held a record for 10 years. The rest of the people are growers, and they get what's called an odd phenotype and think they've got a new pepper. In the pepper-breeding world, there are really only a few of us who intentionally breed peppers. What is it like in the world of hot pepper breeding? Is it a competitive field? (For comparison, jalapeños reach 2,000 to 8,000 SHU.) Scientific American caught up with Currie to talk about his heat-seeking trajectory and whether hot peppers can get even spicier.Īn edited transcript of the interview follows. With a spiciness level of 2.693 million Scoville heat units (SHU) on average, Pepper X handily unseated the previous hottest pepper on Earth, the Carolina Reaper-also bred by Currie, who founded the PuckerButt Pepper Company, a hot pepper farm and pepper-product supplier in Fort Mill, S.C. By all reports, the taste test involves a burning sensation followed by several hours of intestinal cramping. Currie is one of the few people to have tried Pepper X raw. This proprietary pepper, bred by Ed Currie, was recognized in October 2023 by Guinness World Records as the hottest pepper ever independently tested. A new world-record holder has entered the field of hot peppers: Pepper X.

Carolina reaper pepper scoville scale