Sorry, Scoville. Peppers deserve better than an archaic heat scale.
September 1, 2022 11:07 AM   Subscribe

 
I nominate Sean Evans for the governing body making any decisions about new heat scales.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:27 AM on September 1, 2022 [19 favorites]


Here’s how it works: Take a pepper, dry it, and dissolve it in alcohol. Then, start diluting it with sugar water. Keep diluting it until three of a panel of five humans — yes, humans — can no longer taste the heat. If you have to dilute one unit of capsaicin-infused alcohol with 10,000 units of sugar water for the pepper’s flavor to be undetectable, that pepper rates 10,000 on the Scoville scale.

It was a great system, because humans turn out to be very good at detecting capsaicin.

But they’re not nearly as good as high-performance liquid chromatographs.
I'm... ok with humans. It sounds fun, and not everything needs to be done in the most efficient way.

Also if they got rid of the Scoville system, it would be saying "you have to have a $50,000-70,000 machine to do this test." I imagine people mostly don't sit around doing the Scoville test any more, and sure you can probably rent time on those machines for $100 or whatever. But I LIKE the Scoville test. It feels to me like getting rid of it would be taking science and insisting it has to be done with expensive machinery when it clearly doesn't.
posted by aniola at 11:32 AM on September 1, 2022 [23 favorites]


Also I like the name Scoville better than Haspel.
posted by aniola at 11:32 AM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


According to Wikipedia, for decades, the Scoville heat measure of peppers has been calculated quantitatively using an accepted conversion between ppm of capsaicinoids (in the dried pepper mass, calculated by HPLC) and Scoville heat. With Scoville = 15 * ppmH (where ppmH is a weighted average of the concentration of two different capsaicinoids) per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale#Quantification_by_HPLC -- it's not a qualitatively deduced measure any more.

The author of this piece suggest replacing this by a simple 1-10 rating scale, and that seems not a serious suggestion to replace Scoville, but maybe something a National Chili Pepper Marketing Board might take up for peppers sold in grocery stores.
posted by 3j0hn at 11:35 AM on September 1, 2022 [17 favorites]


I have some minor quibbles with this.

ALL common measurement scales are hella old. We've been using Celsius, meters, candelas, kilograms etc since the 1700's or earlier. just because a measurement is old isn't really an argument that a unit should be replaced.

Measurement systems need to be changed when they are not fit for purpose any more. I would argue that the scoville system is still useful even if the realization of it is not. We still use meters and kilograms even though we don't define those units with physical objects that live in a vault in Paris anymore. if you correlated HPLC measurements of the various compounds to an averaged scale of human perception you could have the accuracy and convenience of modern analytical technique with a system that is in common use.
posted by Dr. Twist at 11:36 AM on September 1, 2022 [12 favorites]


Yeah, the only real difference I see (apart from "gratuitously* using an expensive machine because SCIENCE!") is converting the Scoville scale from thousands to 1-10. Call 'em Scovettes?

*because the outcome is essentially the same
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:36 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


Also the Haspel scale doesn't make sense to me. How are they planning to measure heat?

It seems like the numbers would have to change all the time if 1 was lowest and 10 was highest. When they bred the heatless jalapeno they'd have to add a 0. Maybe someday someone will breed a mint jalapeno or something. Would the scale have to be expanded to negative numbers? And as new hottest peppers get bred, they'd eventually have to add higher numbers or re-number the peppers that were no longer 10s. Etc.
posted by aniola at 11:36 AM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


It could just be, you know, log10 Scoville, maybe, to make the number tidy. Like the ph scale, or the db scale. 0-7 or maybe 8 at the most. Maybe call 'em logscos. Scologs. Slogs.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:47 AM on September 1, 2022 [8 favorites]



So why, oh why, on God’s green Earth are we still measuring chile pepper heat on the Scoville scale?


roll up
roll up
get your hot takes right here
posted by lalochezia at 11:49 AM on September 1, 2022 [11 favorites]


Scoville sounds like a guy with a handlebar mustache and a derby hat. Who, on consuming too many Scoville units, would end up with pinwheels for eyes and smoke jets coming out both ears.
posted by gimonca at 11:51 AM on September 1, 2022 [18 favorites]


3j0hn, interesting to know Scovilles these days actually are measured by chromatography. So most of this clickbaity article is just out of date but we still have the annoyance at the weird scale. 1-10 works for me, so do the little 1 to 4 chile peppers you see printed on menus. I'm more interested in the subjective experience of heat. It's not linear at all; 10,000 Scoville chile is not 10x hotter than 1000 Scoville chile. I suspect logarithmic is a good approximation but don't really know.

Also there's so many varieties of heat, the hit-you-up-front, the slow burn, etc. A lot of that has to do with the medium the chile is suspended in (oil, water, vinegar, etc) but serious chileheads also talk about the different impacts of heat as an intrinsic property of the chile itself. So.. huh?

My favorite place to order dried chiles online is good about listing Scovilles on the chiles they sell. It's been a big help when making my favorite Texas chili recipe which is a little fussy having you mixing various dried chile varieties. The mixture really matters for flavor but then you need to be a little careful about heat.

My favorite way to add pure heat to dishes now is a small mount of ground West African dried birdseye chiles. They are not fucking around. Usually I'm picking my chiles for other flavors, not the heat, but if I want to just add a little heat to something (like my gumbo last night) this stuff is great.
posted by Nelson at 11:53 AM on September 1, 2022 [4 favorites]


Huh. The original version of the test reminds me of naturopathy / flower waters.
posted by Bee'sWing at 11:55 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


It seems like the numbers would have to change all the time if 1 was lowest and 10 was highest. When they bred the heatless jalapeno they'd have to add a 0.

This is addressed in the text:
Let’s use habaneros to anchor the top end of the scale (and superhot peppers can be over 10). Poblanos are a 1. Jalapeños are a 2, and so on, in a perfectly understandable, simple scale based on a number we can measure.
I mean, pegging habaneros to 10 gives you the benefit of being able to do a Spinal Tap "these go to 11" when you use something hotter, so not adjusting the top end of the scale as newer, hotter peppers are found or cultivated seems like a net positive.

Anyway, I thought this was an entertainingly dumb article, especially when she got to the part where she realized her genius system had already been done:
I thought this was a genius, original idea until I went to the Scoville scale website and saw that it breaks peppers down exactly this way.
Side question: why is the tilde preserved for the word jalapeño in English, but not in habanero?
posted by fedward at 12:07 PM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


Maxing the scale at habanero suggests an ignorance of chile. The author waves it off as "hottest chile we're likely to cook with", which fair enough, but that's excluding a lot of people excited about hotter chile.

There's no ñ in habanero because it's not pronounced with an ñ. The name is thought to mean "from Havana". (Which is ironic, since that kind of chile is not a common thing in Cuba.)
posted by Nelson at 12:10 PM on September 1, 2022 [10 favorites]


Thought to? That's like saying that The New Yorker is so named to suggest that it is from New York.
posted by acb at 12:12 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


I mean, being "excited about hotter chile" seems to imply the need for a system with no defined upper bound. In the post-WeRateDogs® world we have, an X-out-of-10 system making use of numbers that go to Eleven (or more) doesn't seem bad to me. I'm sort of joking, but also not joking at all, because aficionados are going to keep cultivating hotter peppers that many other people are never going to eat. Having something be a 12 on a 10 scale actually seems meaningful to me. I feel like a 12 or a 13 is a better answer than the 10++ or 10+++ currently given as Scoville Heat Level ratings to the hottest peppers.

I can't answer any questions about whether log scales make sense. The hottest peppers I've ever kept on hand were pequin and I use them only sparingly.
posted by fedward at 12:35 PM on September 1, 2022


It seems like the numbers would have to change all the time if 1 was lowest and 10 was highest.

I don't know if it's a physical limit or a legal one, but I believe the highest concentration crystalline capsaicin you can buy is 16 million scovilles, so it's not like the upper bound would have to keep moving.

But yeah, if you use 1 to 10 you'd definitely need some kind of log in there considering where actual peppers land, otherwise you'd have the hottest peppers known to man at about 2 out of 10 which would be very weird.
posted by juv3nal at 12:43 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]






Previously on metafilter: Astro Zombie eats the apocalypse pepper

"the apocalypse pepper is so far beyond that your brain is not even capable of registering it as pain. Instead, you simply assume you have gone mad. There is a very distinct sense that you may actually have lost your mouth, your nose, and throat; one imagines oneself rather grotesquely, as a humanlike thing who has had these body parts torn away..."
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 1:00 PM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


Yes, indeed!
posted by Midnight Skulker at 1:06 PM on September 1, 2022


They're Red Hot
posted by BWA at 1:16 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]




I'll stick with green peppers from the produce department. That's hot enough for me.
posted by Czjewel at 1:19 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


The empericized Scoville scale using HPLC has an upper limit of 1,000,000 ppmH * 15 = 15,000,000 Scoville. So using a scaled log system* to make that 10/10, and 500 scoville a 1/10, you get a Carolina Reaper at 8/10, and a typical habanero at 6/10, jalapeno at 3.5/10, etc which seems a reasonable system that is not too compressed. It would inspire the pepper breeders to tilt at the unobtainable 9/10 hotness chili pepper.

*log_a(S/b) where S in Scoville, a = 3.1438, b=159.04
posted by 3j0hn at 1:28 PM on September 1, 2022 [4 favorites]


None of these scales help me figure out which shishitos in the bag will be their typical, pleasantly warm spice, or straight melt my face off.

Low quality scales.
posted by furnace.heart at 1:36 PM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


Side question: why is the tilde preserved for the word jalapeño in English, but not in habanero?

Because there is not originally a tilde in habanero. People (and apparently peppers) from Havana/La Habana are habanera/os, with no tilde, though sometimes English-speakers stick the tilde in on the assumption that it got left out. Habanero is, in fact, the first example in the wikipedia article on hyperforeignism.

I hope other languages find it flattering that English speakers assume internal consistency in their spelling and prounciation, on the grounds that we must have imported the word wrong.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 1:49 PM on September 1, 2022 [15 favorites]


This 1-10 scale reminds me of the Fahrenheit temperature scale: To humans, living in air that is 100 F is insanely hot, 0 F insanely cold, but on the edges of tolerable (though we could argue about whether they are set at precisely the right levels, and that's not actually how the temperatures were chosen). There are of course temperatures above 100 and below 0, but 0 and 100 are easily relatable.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:55 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


Literally de gustibus est disputandum, awesome
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 2:08 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


Despite its shortcomings, the article did have that wonderful picture of a pepper-eating contest in China, which implied that, if the contestants ran out of peppers on their plates, they could just grab them out of the water.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:10 PM on September 1, 2022


Aside from the fact that Scoville units are, unintentionally, an almost-perfect base for showoff values (OVER 10 MILLION!!!111!!!eleventy), I wouldn't hate just using the base-10 log of Scoville units. Jalapenos? 3.7. Habaneros? 5.3.

The problem with log scales is with Jalapenos at 3.7 and Habaneros at 5.3, the stunt factor isn't as cool.
posted by tclark at 2:15 PM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


When this happens, the unfortunate tribesman's ashes are mixed into a paste and then ceremonially eaten. Obviously, this is the only way you can eat the apocalypse pepper. The iepper itself has never been tested, but the ashes of someone who has touched them come in at a whopping 30 million Scoville units. It's extraordinarily rare to be invited to participate in the apocalypse pepper ceremony. To the best of my knowledge, only non-natives have ever done so. The first was Sir Robert Blythe-Green in 1909; he left a handwritten account of the ceremony the day he took his own life. There is Margaret Whitechapel, who, of course, when mad from the experience. And there is me.

The apocalypse pepper is perhaps not so mythical as the venerable Astro Zombie might think.

Resiniferatoxin, an analogue of capsaicin produced by a couple of different relatives of your Christmas cactus, has a Scoville score of 16 billion.
posted by jamjam at 2:22 PM on September 1, 2022 [6 favorites]


I kind of like that Scoville numbers are like pinball scores.

I also like hot peppers. Like, until my face melts hot.
posted by chavenet at 2:32 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


They're Red Hot
posted by BWA at 4:16 PM on September 1


Ring of Fire
posted by TedW at 3:07 PM on September 1, 2022


1912 isn’t that old; we still use the Richter scale that was developed in the 1930s. And detection dogs use technology that is at least 15,000 years old!
posted by TedW at 3:15 PM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


and refrigeration, 1912? If they mean ice house, ice box and those early devices that were really unsafe, right but "Practical household refrigerators were introduced in 1915 and gained wider acceptance in the United States in the 1930s as prices fell and non-toxic, non-flammable synthetic refrigerants such as Freon-12 (R-12) were introduced."
posted by clavdivs at 3:32 PM on September 1, 2022


Yea. And what about that antique the "periodic table of elements"? OLD !
posted by Goofyy at 3:54 PM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


Previously on metafilter: Astro Zombie eats the apocalypse pepper

The Apocalypse Pepper sounds very similar to the reports I’ve read of the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper. Perhaps they are one and the same?

(Also, that’s the first time I’d seen Astro Zombie’s retelling of his transformational pepper experience, becoming the 400th person to favorite that comment.)
posted by darkstar at 5:18 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


I think of this like the difference between frequency and pitch. A function generator can help you tune a violin, but no orchestra in the world would try to tune by having every player individually use one.

I think a liquid chromatograph is unlikely to provide a superior measure of human perception than a poll of human perception.
posted by dsword at 7:08 PM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


It isn't even a NEW change that we use HPLC for the Scoville scale: I learned about that in 2007 when I was in first year chemistry, and did the measurements myself a few years later in 3rd year labs.
posted by Canageek at 8:06 PM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


Maxing the scale at habanero suggests an ignorance of chile. The author waves it off as "hottest chile we're likely to cook with",
I'm sorry, what? My wife casually tossed three habaneros into a pasta primavera for me a while back and I was like "yeah, this is fairly hot", but in no way would I say that's the hottest pepper that's ever going to be cooked with in this house.

(Mind you, we do have a bottle of Dingo's Widow Maker hot sauce on the kitchen table, which they reckon is a 15/10, so I've probably lost some perspective.)
posted by krisjohn at 9:26 PM on September 1, 2022


I only need a 3 degree scale. Not spicy at all / funny / funny but in a bad way
posted by Literaryhero at 2:59 AM on September 2, 2022 [3 favorites]


just because a measurement is old isn't really an argument that a unit should be replaced

If it's not under active development it's obsolete. Hate is love. War is peace. Disruption is reliability. Lies are alternative facts. Get with the program.
posted by flabdablet at 3:55 AM on September 2, 2022




I usually don't cook with extremely hot peppers. But for instance, I often roast poblano peppers until charred, skin them, and then chop them with onions. I sauté these until the onions are a little dark, then add beaten eggs to the pan. I make tacos with this when cooked, adding fresh cilantro, pico de gallo, ripe avocado. Fresh crumbled Mexican cheese. Fresh toasted El Milagro corn tortillas from Chicago, where you buy them in a store and they're still warm from this morning's manufacture.

Sometimes this dish is lightly hot. Sometimes this dish is super-fiery. I find I have to taste each raw poblano (generally considered a very mild pepper) because sometimes you get a poblano that's way, way hotter than its siblings. Like, a LOT hotter. And they look the same.

If two poblanos purchased the same day at the same market can vary so wildly, then it seems likely this is the case for other peppers. I've found this to be true of jalapeños and serranos, too. The Scoville scale is kind of a rough estimate—at least with the chilis I mention. There's very likely a wide variation in other chilis, too.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:01 AM on September 2, 2022


I was coming here to ask about the different dimensions of heat. We just did the Hot Ones home challenge, and I encountered a thing I only recently experienced for the first time with an order of especially hot Korean Fried Chicken (but not even the stuff you have to sign a waiver for): heat, but also a bitterness SO extreme that with the KFC I gagged in a sort of "I've been poisoned have to get this out of me" way, where my husband was like "sorry you personally had that experience" and kept eating. With the hot sauce (a much more cautious dot of sauce) it was simply NOPE THAT'S NOT FOOD and straight for the chocolate milk. We had a split experience where some of us found #7 incredibly unpleasant in that bitter way but 8 and even 9 were flavorful and not meaningfully worse in heat, but my husband had to tap out at 8 because stuff was swelling.

I feel like you need more of a graph than just a scale for this kind of thing.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:25 AM on September 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


The consensus of the thread seems to be that TFA is kind of dumb once you get past the good exposition of what exactly the Scoville scale is. I did not, however, notice anyone calling out that TFA is worth visiting if only for the photograph of (what seems to be) a giant hot tub with a big circle of women in it up to their necks, surrounded by rafts of floating ripe red chilis, each with a plate of smaller chilis in front of her. They appear to be having a good time.

I concur that TFA does not effectively make the case for abolishing the Scoville scale, about which it is not news that panels of humans were long since replaced by HPLC. The fact that the Scoville scale (as quantitatively defined for HPLC) can represent pure capsicum means that it can keep representing every kind of new weapons-grade pepper that comes along. So, yeah, kind of a waste of attention.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:49 AM on September 2, 2022


New =/= better
posted by yellowcandy at 11:32 AM on September 2, 2022


Keep in mind that the hotness of peppers is very dependent on growing conditions. I once grew some habaneros that were not very hot at all
posted by canoehead at 11:44 AM on September 2, 2022


They... what?! I was using firefox reader and missed the photo. Here's more good times.

The winner at that event ate 20 tabasco chilis (3 out of 5 on the Wikipedia chili scale) in one minute in a hot spring in winter.
posted by aniola at 11:45 AM on September 2, 2022


I enjoy spicy food and hot sauces, and - until recently - I thought I decently tolerated heat. But people like the ones aniola linked to make me feel like an absolute lightweight!
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:02 PM on September 2, 2022


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