Tasty (17 page)

From south Asia, chilies spread to Siam and Burma, the Philippines, and beyond; they were already growing on some Pacific Islands when Europeans first arrived later in the sixteenth century. Chili routes soon began to double back on themselves: when Africans were captured and enslaved starting in the late 1500s, they brought food flavored with hot chilies back to the Americas.

Four hundred years later, chilies are found nearly everywhere in the world. Four thousand strains provide the sizzle for countless dishes, from Mexican
mole
s to Thai curries. They're second only to salt on the list of most popular spices, outselling their next closest competitor, black pepper, by five to one. In the twenty-first century, a chili pepper renais
sance has pushed heat to new levels. A generation ago, traditional varieties such as the Scotch bonnet and habanero peppers had set the upper bounds of hotness, clocking in at 200,000 and 300,000 Scoville units, respectively. Ghost peppers were considered too painful for Western palates. But tastes changed. Jalapeños and banana peppers became standard fare in the blandest salad bars. Reality TV shows followed hosts roaming the world, sampling outrageous dishes. The worldwide chili pepper trade is 25 times the size it was fifty years ago, the world's population only 2.2 times larger. Americans ate an average of three pounds of chilies a year in 1980. That number has more than doubled, and the upward arc continues.

The race to breed superhot peppers is the vanguard of this heat movement. Aficionados belong to a passionate subculture whose ethos falls somewhere between those of wine connoisseurs and
Star Trek
fans, obsessed with the minutiae of seed trading, cultivar purity, and the Scoville scale. The field tends to be male-dominated; studies have shown men favor chili heat more than women, and there is some competitive macho frisson in the experience—and the idea—of ultrahotness. “You've got to understand the chili-head mentality,” said Jim Duffy, a chili grower who lives outside San Diego. “It's like the person who goes out shopping for knickknacks at garage sales: they've got to keep satisfying that thing. They throw so many plants in their backyard and their wife's going, ‘What are you going to do with all those peppers? Where are we going to plant my cucumbers?' And they're like, ‘Uh, I didn't think of that.' They went on my website, saw all the pretty pictures, the eye candy, just like a guy looks at the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue.”

There are thirty known pepper species, all of the genus
Capsicum
(from the Greek
kapto
, meaning “bite”). Five have been domesticated. Ordinary bell peppers, which have no bite, are a variety of
Capsicum annuum
; in addition to the Carolina Reaper,
Capsicum chinense
varieties include habaneros and ghost peppers. When he began cultivating peppers in earnest in the early 2000s, Ed Currie gathered seeds from those and others from around the world—at first, the package deliveries, his greenhouses, and the odd smells emanating from his kitchen raised the eyebrows of neighbors, who called the police.

Every one of the two hundred kinds of peppers Currie grows rates above 200,000 Scoville units, the pungency of a habanero. But he paid attention to flavor as well. He was trying to build a hot sauce business, and hot sauces have many aromatic subtleties to bring out the flavors in foods. He coaxed notes of sweetness, chocolate, cinnamon, and citrus from his chilies. In his greenhouses, colors of these varieties explode: yellow, orange, white, purple, as tantalizing as jungle fruits would have been for our primate ancestors. The business grew slowly at first, then faster with the help of friends. An accounting firm agreed to do his taxes in exchange for a case of hot sauce. A next-door neighbor offered backyard space for a greenhouse. A friend lent him a few acres of fallow farmland south of town for growing space.

As his business grew, Currie experimented with several dozen superhot cultivars. The Carolina Reaper is the crowning achievement of an arduous process. It typically takes eight years to produce a horticulturally unique chili. Plants must be carefully segregated to prevent cross-pollination. Repeated crosses and certain traits must take hold, so that genes can be passed from generation to generation. Many growers try, but cannot produce consistently hot fruits, and abandon the
effort. Currie claims to have accelerated this process by three years, and grown a strain that always produces a desired level of heat. At a university lab, samples are freeze-dried, ground into powder, and dissolved in alcohol: the resulting solutions are clear shades of red, yellow, and caramel. They are run through a gas chromatograph, which vaporizes them and measures the concentration of capsaicin to get the Scoville scale measurement. The Carolina Reaper averaged 1,569,700 Scoville units. Currie had some up-and-coming varieties that surpassed that figure. But Guinness was taking its time. “We've been going back and forth with Guinness for three years. I don't care if it takes another three years,” he said. “Because what we're doing will last. World records can be one-off peppers that couldn't be reproduced.”

The hucksterism surrounding the Guinness record led scientists at New Mexico State University's Chili Pepper Institute to take a more deliberate approach, growing top superhot varieties (though not Currie's) together under controlled conditions in 2011. The winner was the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, another
Capsicum chinense
cultivar, ranked at 1.2 million Scoville heat units.

• • •

At a local restaurant, Currie opened a plastic zipper bag and dumped a pile of chilies, collected from his greenhouses, onto the table: Reapers, ghost peppers, and another variety called the Moruga Viper, in shades of red, orange, and bright yellow. He took a steak knife and carefully cut narrow slices of each, then passed the plate. The sensation of any superhot chili is not a raw blast; its qualities vary depending on the type of plant, the amount of capsaicin, and related substances called capsaicinoids, tempered by the complex chemi
cal makeup of the pepper. Chili heat has three main elements. The first involves suspense: as chewing breaks open cell walls and releases capsaicin, there's a lag time between the initial bite and the perception of heat. This varies by pepper variety; habaneros have a particularly long delay of fifteen to twenty seconds. The second feature is dissipation. The heat from chilies in Thai cuisine tends to ease quickly, while varieties such as the ghost pepper linger. Finally, each burn has a unique feel. Asian peppers have a prickly heat; with American Southwest chilies, it's broad and flat.

I brought my teenaged son, Matthew, to taste the Carolina Reaper. He had been a dedicated heat freak since sometime not long after birth, preferring hot salsa on tortilla chips at the age of two. As he got older, he pursued this taste avidly, ordering the hottest dishes in restaurants, savoring habanero peppers as tears streamed down his cheeks. He seemed out to bludgeon his senses, reaching for a boundary between flavor and sensory overload, where taste blends into other visceral bodily responses and blots everything else out. The hottest known chili was the ultimate challenge, a Mount Everest of taste.

He put a small slice on his tongue. His hands went to his cheeks and mouth. He stood up, breathing hard. He ate some buttered bread; capsaicin dissolves in milk fat, which is why milk or butter helps cut the burn. He sopped up ranch dressing with another slice and chewed on that for a few minutes. He put a slice of lime in his mouth, hoping that the strong sensation would distract from the burn. I put a slice of Reaper, only a few millimeters square, on my tongue. The heat came in about fifteen seconds after a pleasant start, a taste of lemon and chocolate. The burning spread over my tongue and around my mouth and became overwhelming.
A kind of wave washed through my body. Voices around me receded as I slouched in my chair. I noticed my nose was running, and then I began to hiccup.

Currie hefted a whole pepper, bit off half, and chewed it nonchalantly. He sipped ice water (which has little effect on the pepper burn). His eyes watered a bit, but this soon passed. “I literally feel it in every inch of my body,” he assured us. “But it is a positive feeling.” Then he popped the rest in. We amateurs looked on, impressed, our mouths still burning.

• • •

Chili heat is painful, yet enjoyable; fiery, with no rise in temperature. In 1953, T. S. Lee, a biologist at the National University of Singapore, tried to unravel the physiology behind this reaction. He asked a group of forty-six young men to eat chilies, and monitored their sweating. Perspiration is a physiological reaction to heat. Rising body temperature, whether from the surroundings or from muscles warming during exercise, triggers a reaction in the hypothalamus. Via a series of feedbacks between the brain and the body, sweat glands go to work. Sweat evaporating off the skin cools the body; when its temperature drops back to normal, it stops.

Lee had the volunteers dress in cotton trousers only, then painted their faces, ears, necks, and upper bodies with a solution of iodine and dusted them with dry cornstarch—a combination that makes sweat turn blue. Lee used peppers common in Asian cuisine, from the species
Capsicum annuum
. Their tapered red fruits are about ten to twenty times hotter than jalapeños. For the sake of comparison, at a different time Lee's subjects also taste-tested solutions of cane sugar, bitter quinine, acetic acid, potassium alum (an astringent that makes the lips pucker), ground black pepper, mustard paste,
and hot oatmeal. Some also gargled with hot water, chewed rubber, or swallowed feeding tubes.

In one experimental run, after eating chilies for five minutes straight, the subjects flushed red in the face, then all but one began to sweat. The areas around their noses and mouths turned blue, followed by their cheeks. Lee did another trial with seven participants, feeding them one pepper, then another: five continued to sweat, two profusely. Among the controls, only the acid and ground pepper made the volunteers sweat.

Eating chilies doesn't raise body temperature, so there is no physical need for cooling. Yet in Lee's experiment, the subjects sweated as if they had run a mile on a hot afternoon. To verify that the reactions to chili heat and genuine heat were equivalent, Lee had some volunteers put their legs in hot water. As their temperatures rose, the patterns of sweating on their faces were identical to those produced by eating peppers.

Lee had already deduced that chili heat could not be a taste, because people felt its burn on their lips, where there are no taste receptors. His experimental results indicated another body system was at work: the one that registers discomfort from burning. The chili burn was a form of pain. But it differs in one important respect: touch boiling water, and the pain intensifies until the hand is withdrawn. Start eating a Carolina Reaper, and the heat builds for several minutes, becoming overwhelming. But continue, and the heat recedes, leaving the mouth numb to chili's effects. Capsaicin causes pain, then blocks it.

Chili extracts have been used as painkillers for centuries or longer, stretching back into the pre-Columbian era. In 1552, a pair of Mexican natives, Martín de la Cruz, a healer, and Juan Badiano, a teacher, collaborated on a guide to Aztec
herbal remedies now known as the
Badiano Codex
. It makes extensive use of the analgesic properties of chilies. One remedy for inflamed gums was to make a compress: boil the roots of several kinds of pepper plants along with a chili paste, wrap the resulting stew in cotton, and press it against the afflicted area. Elsewhere, native Americans rubbed hot peppers on their genitals to dull sensation and prolong their sexual pleasure—something early Spanish settlers also tried, to the dismay of prudish priests accompanying them. In nineteenth-century China, chili extracts were used as a local anesthetic for men about to be castrated to serve the emperor's court as eunuchs.

It was capsaicin's painkilling potential that the chemist Wilbur Scoville was trying to exploit when he developed his eponymous heat scale a century ago. He worked at the laboratory of one of the world's leading drug manufacturers, the Parke-Davis Company, outside Detroit. Parke-Davis and other pharmaceutical makers of the era were finding new ways to use plant alkaloids, including capsaicin and cocaine. (Parke-Davis once paid Sigmund Freud twenty-four dollars to rate its cocaine products, including a powder and an elixir, against those of its more established German rival, Merck. He noted only a small difference in taste, writing: “This is a beautiful white powder (available at a low price).”

Capsaicin was the active ingredient in Heet Liniment, Parke-Davis's topical painkiller cream. Scoville was assigned to measure the relative hotness of various pepper plants and concentrations of capsaicin, so that the correct dose could be more accurately gauged. Too much capsaicin burned unpleasantly; too little didn't work. Capsaicin had been isolated in 1846 by John Clough Thresh, who named it, and also noted that it was chemically related to vanilla. Capsaicin and its relatives, the most pungent compounds in the world, are molec
ular cousins to one of the gentlest, smoothest flavors. In 1912, there was no simple chemical test to detect capsaicin—only the sense of taste. Scoville ground up dried peppers and prepared extracts of different strengths. He assembled a panel of five lab colleagues. If a sample tasted hot, he diluted it repeatedly until no heat could be detected. The more dilution required to eliminate the last trace of burn, the hotter the pepper was.

Scoville had found a way to quantify a subjective sensation, an important achievement. He called it the Scoville Organoleptic Test, with heat measured in Scoville units. A rating of one million Scoville units meant that the extract had to be diluted to a concentration of one part per million before its heat disappeared. This approach was somewhat imprecise, because people have varying sensitivities to heat just as they do to other flavors, which is why today, the absolute concentration of capsaicin in a pepper is measured with a chromatograph and then converted to Scoville units.