The Iron Yuppie

World's Hottest Hot Sauces

There is nothing about this site that is not spectacularly cool. Especially this:



This little gem is called Blair's 6.a.m. It is 16 million on the Scoville Scale. (I love the fact that there's a scale for this stuff.) Ok, that sounds big, but let's put some meat behind that. 16 million is, well, 16 million times hotter than a bell pepper for high values of a bell pepper. It is also one thousand six-hundred times hotter than a smoked jalapeno and three hundred and twenty times hotter than tabasco sauce.

Apparently, the hot stuff in hot stuff is a compound called capsaicin. I've always wondered... what would happen if you ate too much hot sauce? The interesting thing about this is that it's ultimately guided by the strength of the chemical bond. Acids are only acidic because the strength of the negative ion that releases the hydrogen ion is wicked high (this is the technical term). But you can't really add more acid to acid to get it any stronger. In this case, if you have pure capsaicin, is it just pure heat? What is pure capsaicin on the Scoville scale?

According to the BBC, trying a granule of this is like smashing your tongue on a table with a hammer. Wow, now that is pain.

D