Scoville Heat Unit

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Scoville Heat Unit

The Scoville heat unit is referred to repeatedly in the world of hot sauce. So what, exactly, is it? Wilbur Scoville developed a test, officially called the Scoville Organoleptic Test, in 1912. His original test was subjective, consisting of a panel of testers tasting increasingly diluted mixtures of ground chiles in a sugar-water solution. The amount of sugar-water necessary to entirely cancel the heat in the pepper is the Scoville heat unit. For example, the hottest pepper recorded scored 577,000 Scoville heat units. This means it would take 577,000 cups of sugar-water to neutralize the heat in 1 cup of that pepper. This test is obviously limited by human subjectivity, as different people have vastly different heat tolerances. The same kind of pepper can also vary tremendously depending on growth conditions.

The Scoville heat unit is still the unit of measurement for heat today, but instead of a human panel, it is more often tested by High Performance Liquid Chromatography, or HPLC. In this process the capsaicinoids, which are the chemicals in a pepper responsible for its heat, are extracted. They are then placed in the HPLC device and analyzed. The HPLC can "see" the amount of capsaicinoids in the pepper, as well as differentiate the individual varieties. This analysis is then transposed into the better known Scoville unit.

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