Chile Pepper Fun Fact - The Scoville Scale
So, what is the Scoville Scale anyway?
A Chile Peppers heat level is measured by Scoville Heat Units (SHU). The Scoville Scale was created by American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in 1912. The Scoville scale relies partly on a human tester, so measurement is sometimes imprecise. A more accurate (though not as fun) method is to use high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). HPLC provides results that are often 20–40% less than the SHU method, but at the end of the day it is all relative. The higher the SHU number of a Pepper, the hotter it is!
American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville invented the Scoville scale in 1912. Scoville created the scale by way of his Scoville Organoleptic Test, which he used to measure a pepper's heat level. When conducting his test, Scoville mixed an alcohol-based extract of capsaicin oil from a pepper into a solution of sugar water and placed the solution onto the tongues of taste testers. Little by little, he diluted the solution with more water until his taste testers told him that it no longer tasted hot.
Scoville then assigned a number rating to that pepper based on how many times he had to dilute the solution to eliminate the heat. Jalapeño peppers, for instance, have a Scoville rating of 10,000, which means a jalapeño solution would have to be diluted 10,000 times before the heat was neutralized.