Tasty by John McQuaid

Author:John McQuaid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER 7

Quest for Fire

At the start of the twenty-first century, a coterie of amateur horticulturalists around the world began an unusual competition. Toiling in backyards, trading seeds, and seeking tips on the Internet, they pursued a goal that seemed more the domain of food science labs: cultivating the hottest chili pepper in the world. They were trying to dethrone the Guinness Book of World Records champion since 1994, the Red Savina, a smooth-skinned chili about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, and two hundred times as hot as a jalapeño.

For growing numbers of enthusiasts, sampling the superhot burn of such chilies was both an exercise in culinary appreciation and a test of mettle. The gardeners believed that the potential of chili heat had barely been tapped. To unlock it, they cross-pollinated existing hot pepper plants or grafted one onto another, hoping to get offspring consistently hotter than either parent. To enhance pungency, some exposed their plants to heat lamps and underwatered them. Prospective record-setting chilies were sent to labs that assessed their concentrations of capsaicin, the chemical responsible for the burning sensation. The goal was to surpass the Red Savina’s rating of 577,000 Scoville heat units, the scale that measures hotness.

There were setbacks. In 2006, the Red Savina, a strain of habanero, was finally beaten by farmers in India. Guinness named a new record-holder, the Bhut Jolokia, commonly known as the “ghost pepper” for its pale, milky color. It had grown widely for decades in northeastern India’s Assam region. Its hotness hovered around 1 million Scoville units. But the hobbyists persisted, and soon they had a series of breakthroughs. In 2010 and 2011, the Guinness title changed hands three times in four months.

The first new record-holder was the Infinity Chili (1,087,286 Scoville units), bred in Lincolnshire, England, by a gardener named Nick Woods. It was quickly overtaken by the Naga Viper (1,359,000 Scoville units), grown by Gerald Fowler, a pub owner in Cumbria, England. “Hot enough to strip paint,” he declared. Next was the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T,” grown by Australian planter Marcel de Wit (1,463,700 Scoville units). When de Wit took his first batch to Melbourne to make hot sauce, the cooks put on chemical protective gear to shield themselves from fumes and accidental splashes.

Meanwhile, a mortgage banker living in South Carolina named Ed Currie was also pursuing the Guinness record. He tended to hundreds of chili plants in greenhouses he had built in his yard from two-by-twos and white plastic sheeting. He had a growing hot sauce business, but craved the recognition and cachet of being a world record-holder. Currie believed he had a chili so hot it might hold the title for years. He named it Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper. It was a cultivar of the pepper species Capsicum chinense, known for its explosive heat; its wrinkled, blazing-red chilies were about an inch long and shaped like fists. A nearby university lab verified that Reapers scored consistently above 1.5 million Scoville units; some surpassed 2 million. Currie

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