When Smokin’ Ed Currie realised he had managed to breed the world’s hottest chilli pepper, it seemed logical to mark the occasion by eating one – and getting others to do the same. “I like hot peppers,” he says. “And I like hurting my friends with hot peppers.”
The tasting of Pepper X was filmed to mark its official recognition as the world’s hottest chilli by Guinness World Records. The show was a special edition of Hot Ones, a popular YouTube series in which the host, Sean Evans, normally interviews celebrities as they work their way through an escalating series of spicy chicken wings, answering questions as their composure unravels. This time, the effect was quicker. The subjects were immediately incapacitated; they twitched, writhed and lost the power of speech. Only Currie, on the surface, appeared to be unaffected, standing by calmly, his arms folded.
“If you look at the end of that video, you can see that I’m starting to suffer,” he says, speaking from his chilli farm in South Carolina. “I’m kicking my legs, moving around. I bent over once. I’m hurting the same way everybody else is hurting.” Currie says that the human body perceives hot chillies as a danger, triggering a fight or flight response. “I believe that because I was an addict and an alcoholic for so long, my body automatically goes to the fight response. So I’m able to talk, I’m able to explain what’s going on. But the same physiological things that are happening to everyone else are happening to me.”
Currie, the founder and president of the PuckerButt Pepper Company, has been growing chillies since the 1980s. His website offers dozens of hot sauces, made by PuckerButt and others, with names such as Voodoo Prince Death Mamba, Curbstomp Extreme and Bad Apple. The company employs about 30 people, with up to another 100 employees working on Currie’s chilli farm. The previous hottest chilli, the Carolina Reaper, had held the distinction since 2013, but there were no hard feelings – the Reaper is another of Currie’s creations.
Many of the people who work at PuckerButt are recovering addicts. He says three types of people are interested in superhot chillies: thrill-seekers, hipsters longing to find a fresh trend and addicts in recovery: “We tend to do silly, stupid things before we learn our lessons. We’re real interested in that.”
Currie’s breeding greenhouse contains about 140 plants – “stuff we tried last year” – from which 20 or 30 will be bred. There is a hard economic rationale to the quest for an ever-hotter chilli: “You can take one five-gallon bucket of Carolina Reaper and replace 100 gallons of jalapeños or 50 gallons of habanero to get the same heat.” But he was not trying to breed the hottest pepper when he hit on the Reaper, nor was he trying to outdo himself with Pepper X.
“It was not the goal,” he says. “And it’s honestly not the goal to breed a hotter one, even though we have ones that are potentially hotter than Pepper X. The goal is to have flavour.”
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The ranking of superhot chillies would not be possible without the work of Wilbur Scoville, a pharmacist in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 20th century. Scoville was searching for a reliable way to test levels of capsaicin – the main heat-producing compound in chillies – so that his liniments and pills could be prepared consistently.
In a 1912 paper, Scoville put forward a method whereby a dried sample was macerated in alcohol, then tasted in successive dilutions of sugar water until its pungency was no longer detectable on the tongue. A sample that could be detected until it reached a dilution of one part in 5,000 would be given a score of 5,000 on the Scoville scale. The scale was subjective – relying on the highly variable responses of people’s taste buds – but it endured. The numbers are known as Scoville heat units (SHUs).
These days, the amount of capsaicin in a chilli is determined using high-performance liquid chromatography and expressed in parts per million of heat (ppmH), but the results are converted into SHUs for comparison purposes. Bird’s eye chillies have an SHU rating of between 15,000 and 20,000; the Pepper X fruits grown by Currie reach an average of 2.63m SHUs. But if you have never eaten one, it is difficult to imagine what that tastes like.
“It’s actually very hard to explain what happens, because it’s like you’re leaving the planet for 15 to 20 minutes,” says Claus Pilgaard, a Danish chilli enthusiast, YouTube star and hot sauce proprietor better known as Chili Klaus. Pilgaard has been on Hot Ones four times; he appeared in the video celebrating Pepper X’s world record confirmation. Other than Currie, he was the only person to eat the chilli whole. They may still be the only people to have done so.
“It’s a pain that continues rising,” he says. “You have maybe 20 seconds where you can actually taste the fruitiness and the flavour. And then it’s like a train coming. And it’s not just a small train.”
He was still feeling the effects of Pepper X 12 hours later, he says, although by then the worst was over. “I would say, after a couple of hours, you are able to have a normal life.”
Ten years ago, Pilgaard was a musician and amateur chilli grower who had landed a two-month summer gig on a Danish island. He brought his chilli plants with him and sat down one afternoon to sample a homegrown habanero and describe its attributes on camera – like a wine tasting, he thought.
“After 10 minutes, I thought: this is the worst idea I’d ever had, because I was lying down on the lawn and crying,” he says. But the video was a success. Now he has 167,000 YouTube subscribers and regularly posts videos in which he shares hot chillies with Danish celebrities. Pilgaard’s charm lies in the fact that his suffering is always plain: his face shines, his eyes narrow, he waves his arms and snaps his fingers. “I’m not very good at it,” he says.
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The chilli market is worth £1.23bn annually and is projected to grow to £1.65bn by 2028. Europe is the fastest growing region. Fresh chilli sales in the UK have increased steadily in the past decade, with a big jump at the start of the pandemic, when restaurants were shut (scotch bonnet sales at Tesco rose 170% in three months). Hot sauce varieties have proliferated – at Waitrose, sales are up 55% year on year. Nando’s is now the UK’s fourth-favourite sauce brand, after Heinz, Hellmann’s and HP.
But a liking for spicy food is not the same thing as an appetite for tremendous pain. Superhot chillies have spawned a trend for daredevil consumption in the form of TikTok and YouTube “challenge” videos with titles featuring parenthetical asides such as “(Goes Very Wrong)”, “(Ends Badly)” and “(Vomit Alert)”. They have also given rise to an endurance sport: competitive chilli-eating. In a standard competition, contestants consume a whole chilli each round, working their way up the Scoville scale until there is only one person still chewing.
Shahina Waseem – AKA the UK Chilli Queen – is one of the sport’s fiercest competitors. She has eaten 105 Reapers in one sitting. According to the League of Fire, the chilli-eating governing body, this puts her in fourth place worldwide for that challenge, behind Gregory “Iron Guts” Barlow (160), Mike Jack Eats Heat (135) and Dustin “Atomik Menace” Johnson (122).
Waseem says chilli-eating is one sport where men and women do battle on a level playing field. When you watch her compete, it becomes clear that her main talent is perseverance. She is by no means immune to the effects of superhot chillies. Practice has done little to increase her tolerance to capsaicin – and it shows. “I absolutely do feel the pain,” she says. “I think that’s why I stand out a bit. People think: ‘She’s not going to be able to do this.’ Whenever I go to competitions, I’m dying from like the second or the third round.”
It is thought that capsaicin’s evolutionary purpose is to discourage mammals from eating chilli fruits, in favour of birds, who lack the receptors to experience capsaicin’s sting. The seeds of the fruit can pass through a bird’s digestive tract whole – aiding dispersal – whereas mammals’ molars tend to grind them up.
It is, then, a bit of trickery. While studies have shown that capsaicin increases metabolism and may reduce certain risk factors for heart disease, it is nonetheless a neurotoxin and a chemical irritant. Consumption is not without ill effects, especially in superhot concentrations and among competitive chilli eaters, who can end up with abdominal cramps. “These attacks can last for 14 hours, sometimes 18 hours,” says Waseem. “They’re just awful.”
For this reason, a lot of competitors purge their stomachs immediately after a contest. But in the sort of places where competitions are held – outdoor food festivals, mostly – this isn’t always easy. “Sometimes you just don’t have the ability because you’re out and about,” says Waseem. “And you have people coming up to you afterwards; they want photos, they’re hugging you.”
Perhaps this is the true challenge for competitors: accepting congratulations and making small talk while suffering and looking for a quiet place to vomit. “You’re crying, you’ve got tears coming down, you’re shaking and shivering,” says Waseem. “And then people look at you like you’re a star. It’s kind of sweet.”
As the sport grows, competitive chilli-eating faces fresh challenges, including securing enough sponsorship to allow champions to defend their titles abroad. There is also the prospect of the genetically advantaged dominating the leaderboard. The playing field may be level between the sexes, but it’s more level for some than others. “League of Fire is uncovering people who might not even have capsaicin receptors,” says Waseem. “They can sit there and eat Carolina Reapers like strawberries and not feel any pain at all.” Just like birds.
Then there are the chillies themselves. When Scoville invented his pungency test in 1912, he noted three main types: marketed as Japan, Zanzibar and Mombasa chillies. The hottest, he claimed, were the Mombasa, at 50,000 to 100,000 SHU.
When Waseem began competing more than a decade ago, the world’s hottest chilli was the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, at 1.2m SHU. The Reaper is now routinely the highest rung on the competition ladder. While it averages 1.6m SHU, individual fruits can reach well above 2m SHU.
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Pepper X will not figure in the lineup any time soon; it’s only available as a condiment ingredient, either from Currie’s website or from Heatonist, the company that produces the Last Dab sauce which regularly breaks celebrities in the final round of Hot Ones (“I just wanna go home to my kids!” said Cardi B after tasting it).
Pepper X’s seeds are a closely guarded secret. “It’s kind of frustrating,” says Waseem. “Imagine the world’s fastest car has been created and Lewis Hamilton is not allowed to drive it. Sad for him, but also for the people who watch the sport.”
In competitive circles, according to Waseem, a certain mystique has attached itself to Pepper X, which has been talked about for years, but never arrived on the scene. “There are a lot of questions about the whole thing,” she says. “A lot of people are unhappy because it’s not going to be available.”
Currie says the explanation is simple: “We’re going through a patent process with some lawyers and some researchers and we’re seeing if we can actually patent the plant. Whether that’s going to happen or not, I do not know.”
He did not take these steps with the Reaper: “We gave the Carolina Reaper to the whole world and a lot of people took it and gave me the finger.” Currie spent more than 10 years getting the Reaper (a cross between a naga ghost chilli and a habanero) bred, stabilised and finally recognised as the word’s hottest, but the plant is not a patented strain. Anyone can grow it, use the resulting peppers in a hot sauce and sell it as a Carolina Reaper product. And, all over the world, people do.
It will be a different story, he hopes, with Pepper X – a chilli he says he has kept under wraps for years, in case a rival came along to challenge the Reaper’s supremacy. “If this is something we can patent and I can pass that intellectual property on to my children, then I’m going to do that first,” he says.
