Now That Is a Hot Pepper

According to a report from the BBC News, experts have pronounced a chili grown in the market town of Grantham, England, as the hottest in the world.

Tests have revealed the “Infinity Chilli” to have a Scoville Scale Rating of 1,176,182 — hotter than chilli reportedly used in hand grenades by the Indian military. But what is the attraction of this insanely hot ingredient?

The story of the world’s hottest chili begins not in Mexico or Bangladesh, but next to the barbed wire at RAF Cottesmore in Leicestershire, UK.

Nick Woods, working shifts as an RAF security guard and considering his growing family, decided he had to do something more entrepreneurial with his life.

That was five years ago. What was Nick’s hobby – cooking up hot sauces in his kitchen – developed into his Fire Foods sauce business, and now the 38-year-old Grantham man finds himself literally in possession of hot property.

Like many great discoveries, Nick says he developed the “Infinity Chilli” accidentally.

“There are 4,000 different varieties of chili, and they’re really easy to cross,” he told the BBC. “I knew as soon as I saw it in the polytunnel. It stood out, and when I dissected it I could tell by the skin tissue and the seeds that it was a hot one.”

Technically the chili is not a vegetable but a fruit, from the plant genus “Capsicum.” The heat comes from the substance “capsaicin” which is found in all chillies. The attraction of it lies in the way it livens up our foods and makes the body produce pleasurable endorphins afterwards.

The chili fire is measured by the Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) designed by American chemist Wilbur Scoville in 1912. To put the Grantham chili in context, a jalapeño can score anything between 2,500 to 8,000 SHU on this scale.

The Bhut Jolokia chili weighs in at just over 800,000 SHU. The Indian military are reported to have developed a counter-terrorism hand grenade which uses it as an ingredient to immobilise their adversaries. But Grantham’s Infinity Chili has scored 1,176,182 SHU in a test done last year by Andrew Jukes, a scientist at the University of Warwick’s Crop Centre.