Pepperen

Monday, December 6, 2004 » food update

So at a restaurant recently I had some tomato sauce that was advertised as "spicy." The sauce itself wasn't very hot, so when I found one of the peppers buried in it I decided to just eat it. This turned out to be a poor decision, as it immediately erupted into a very potent and lingering fireball in my mouth. I later found out from the chef that it was a Chinese tien tsin pepper, and after some poking around on das Internet I managed to track down some more information on its rank on the Scoville scale, the rating system for a chili pepper's hotitude. Just for comparison, the fiendish guero pepper I frequently encounter at the local burrito place has a rating of between 500 and 700 Scoville units. A jalapeño is between 2500 and 5000. The tien tsin, on the other hand, clocks in at 60,000. I'm not sure how each pepper's respective preparation (one submerged in a jar with its comrades, the other simmered in a sauce) may have affected its hotness, but that seems like a pretty extreme jump. I can't decide which pepper incident should be considered hotter, either. The guero felt like it had a greater absolute hotness but faded relatively quickly, while the tien tsin was not quite as hot but lingered for much longer. I guess I'll just have to hit up the Exotic Peppers wing of the bookstore over break.