Make It Hot

Meet the World’s Hottest Pepper: Even the Name Is Scary

Eh, doesn't look so bad.
Eh, doesn’t look so bad. Photo: The Chili Factory via Facebook

Extreme eating has a new Holy Grail: The Trinidad Scorpion Butch T. chile pepper, which this week was crowned the world’s hottest. The small red pepper not only has a really metal name, it has to be handled with chemical masks and body suits! (Which raises the question: Isn’t it time we all agree that chile peppers are hot enough, and that we should probably just leave well enough alone? But we digress.) The details, below.

The pepper was grown by the Chili Factory at its Australian chile farm and just barely beat out the previous record-holder, Britain’s Naga Viper, which came in at 1.38 million heat units on the Scoville scale in December — the Scorpion Butch T. reaches 1,463,700. The jalapeño only packs about 2,500 to 5,000 units, the scotch-bonnet pepper hits between 100,000 to 325,000, and the infamous Bhut Jolokia “ghost pepper” reaches just over 1,000,000 units of heat (“Bhut Jolokia’s nothing anymore,” a Butch T. co-creator claims). A hot sauce made with the new chile is in the works, as are, we’re sure, a landslide of YouTube videos showing foolish masochists trying to eat this thing.

New chili pepper crowned world’s hottest [Yahoo]

Meet the World’s Hottest Pepper: Even the Name Is Scary