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Food and Drink > How Hot is Hot?
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Article rating : 0.00, 0 votes. Author : Ray Eddings
Whether you like pushing the envelope and seeking out the hottest possible food or you’d prefer to avoid any spicy foods at all, a standardized method for measuring the heat or spiciness of a giving product can be a useful thing. There are methods for measuring heat but the factors that affect the perceived hotness of a particular dish are so varied that there can never be a totally objective way to do this. However, knowing about the scales that measure heat and knowing where particular foods – especially peppers and chilies – generally fall on those scales can be useful.
The best known measure of the hotness of food is the Scoville scale. Named for the American chemist Wilbur Scoville who developed the scale in 1912, this scale describes the degree of dilution in sugar water required to render a sample’s hotness undetectable. It’s already apparent that there is a lot of subjectivity on Scoville. Judging a product’s place on the scale is carried out by a panel of five people, usually, and personal taste and sensitivities, no matter how much the panelists try to overcome them, will invariably come into play.
However, the
popularity of the scale and its widespread use requires us to overlook its obvious faults. In fact, its well-known subjectivity might make it a superior tool to more precise measurements because the human tongue is even more fickle than Scoville itself. Many things can affect our perception of taste and heat giving us radically different sensitivities throughout any given day; even from hour to hour. Knowing this it is more useful, perhaps, to know that a habanero has a Scoville rating of anywhere from 100,000 to 350,000 while a jalapeno appears between 2,500 and 8,000 on the scale.
Precise measurement of the chemicals that cause heat is possible through high performance liquid chromatography. This method, known as the Gillette method, yields a more defensibly quantifiable measurement of a product’s heat but on human terms is probably no more or less useful than Scoville and, given its perceived objectivity, might seem less reliable when so many other factors can affect heat sensitivity.
All in all, there is no real way to know precisely how hot a hot food will seem. However familiarity with the Scoville scale or the Gillette method can provide some guidelines.
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