b"Peppers are submitted blind andheat. He wants to enjoy the pepper flavor.freeze-dried immediately, the fresher theWe taste every pepper before decid-SCOVILLE NUMBERS FOR COMPARISONbetter. ing to use it. Even superhot peppers must Peppers are around 85% water sohave good flavor, he says. The Carolina water is a major variable, CallowayReaper is sweet at first, then the heat 2.6+ million SHU says. Were measuring the amount ofhits. Thats why sauces made with it taste heat-producing compounds per amountgreat. Balancing flavor with capsaicin is Where Pepper Xof pepper. So, if one pepper has morekey.currently sits, morewater than another, youll get misleadingAnd in fact, about 50% of his breeding than 300 times hotter than a jalapeo. 1,000,000+ SHU results. is for milder peppers to increase yield and Dried peppers are then ground andlower production costs.The thresholdextracted with ethanol. where peppers areChromatography separates com- What Comes After Pepper X?50,000 considered superhot.100,000 SHU pounds so that one shows up at a time,And of course, Currie will keep working Cayenne peppers. Calloway explains. You put your mixtureto create hotter peppers.in and collect data as a function of time. IfWe already have hotter ones, he the capsaicin standard shows up at eightsays. There is one that is stable and four minutes, and the pepper sample shows aor five more were chasing. I grow a lot of 2,5008,000 SHU peak at eight minutes, Im confident thatspeppers. A lot. When you put a 10-acre Typical jalapeocapsaicin.field out of something youre chasing, or peppers. Pepper testing is a unique way fortrying to stabilize, because of the natural students to get hands-on experience withgenetics of the plant, youre going to get HPLC, which is used in many other chem- six to eight different colors coming out of 0 SHU istry applications the same field.Bell peppers Pucker Butt has 11 colors of Carolina register at zeroInside the Scoville Scale Reaper ranging from white to pitch back. Scoville HeatThere are more than 20 unique capsaicinFor Pepper Y, which will be the next Units. compounds that can show up duringpepper, Currie currently has four or five HPLC testing, each with its own potencydifferent colors and uses a mobile HPLC value that contributes differently to theunit to test each color and choose the overall Scoville value. two that score the highest. To get the Scoville heat unit, youThat unit is really cool, and it's about multiply that potency factor by the mass90% accurate to the HPLC that you find in percentage of each compound, Callowaythe chemistry lab, Currie says. says.The peppers that score the highest on This system is an improvement overCurries farm get sent to the university lab the previous method of gas chromatog- for testing. raphy used in the 1970s, and is used inWe have students go through the a wide range of applications, from foodfield and pick the peppers so its totally chemistry and pharmaceutical work torandom. And after the testing is at the environmental analysis.university, well decide which one to focus When it was introduced in the earlyon, Currie says. 1900s, the Scoville value was how manyThat means Currie will be eating a lot times you had to dilute a substancemore hot peppers in the coming years. Its before you stopped tasting heat, so if youwho he is.saw a Scoville value of 10,000, that meansI may have helped bring superhot youd have to dilute it 10,000 times. It waspeppers into mainstream, but I see myself Freshly harvested peppers sorted by colormore subjective, Calloway says.as one cog in a large wheel working to and variety highlight the genetic diversityimprove the market and educate the breeders assess during the stabilizationWhy Flavor Comes First public, he says. SWprocess.PHOTO: ED CURRIEDespite efforts to test and confirm Scovilles, Currie isnt just obsessed with 20/ SEEDWORLD.COMFEBRUARY 2026"