What Puts The Heat Into Chili Peppers?
Chili peppers are used in a wide variety of hot and spicy foods around the world.
Chili peppers originally came from the Americas, particularly Mexico, and they are used worldwide today in different cooking styles.
Christopher Columbus took chilis back to the Old World over 500 hundred years ago and today more than 200 varieties of chilis grow around the world. The largest producer of chilis is India with Mexico being a clear second.
The “heat” in chili peppers is caused by an active compound, called capsaicin. Capsaicin is an irritant to mammals, including people, and it is believed that capsaicin developed as a natural defense mechanism for the chili peppers.
Capsaicin is found in the membrane of a chili pepper and this is where the seeds are also found. The seeds themselves do not produce any capsaicin, although the membrane capsaicin can leak out of the membrane and into the seeds. If you want to reduce the “heat” from a chili pepper then slice the pepper open, cut away the membrane, and seeds, and then discard them. This cuts the “heat” of a chili pepper to about 50% of what it would be if the whole chili were used.
You must take great care when handling chili peppers. I recommend that you wear kitchen gloves. You should certainly be wary of handling chili peppers if you have any cuts or abrasions on your hands, even if they are protected with sticking plasters, because the capsaicin can really make the cuts sting, sometimes extremely painfully. You should never, never, ever rub your eyes after handling chili peppers because the pain is excruciating.
The traditional measurement of the “heat” of chili peppers is the Scoville Scale.
The Scoville Scale is named after Wilbur Scoville who developed his scale of chili heat in 1912. He worked for a company that made an ointment for aching joints in which one of the important ingredients was capsaicin. The company kept getting different heat levels in the ointment when different chilis were used to supply the capsaicin and needed to know how to control this heat.
Wilbur Scoville developed a test where an exact weight of chili extract was diluted with a sugary water solution until a testing panel could not taste any heat at all. The amount of dilution required translates into a scale. The inherent weakness in this scale is that the taste test relied on people so the result was subjective and slightly inaccurate. But the scale was the first serious attempt at measuring chili heat and it survives, and is used, to this day.
There is a blog about the Scoville Scale on our associated Curry Focus website. The blog is called “The Scoville Scale of Chilli Heat”.
There is wide range of heat produced by different chilis. The mildest is the Bell Pepper that has a rating of zero and one of the hottest is the Habanero.
Chili peppers are one of the most well known cooking ingredients. If you want to find out more then you can find a huge number of articles about them on the internet.