![]() ![]() It’s certainly not about flavor, even if a superhot eater might make that claim-if you want the fruitiness of a fresh chile, you can get it from varieties 10 or 20 times less hot. That’s really what it’s all about the shared experience of challenging themselves and the associated high generated by the chile pepper’s endorphin rush. We are talking levels of heat intensity that the average person literally can’t even fathom.Īnd yet, at various points of the year, hundreds or thousands of superhot aficionados will come together to baptize themselves communally in the fire of capsaicin, gathering at pepper conventions, hot sauce expos or competitions hosted by organizations such as the League of Fire, to revel in their collective agony. But wait, the pepper arms race is only heating up at this point-the newly unveiled Pepper X, from Carolina Reaper creator “Smokin’” Ed Currie has just recently been named as the new holder of the title, obliterating the previous mark with a score of 2.69 million Scoville. The Carolina Reaper, on the other hand, which held the world record for about a decade until recently, weighs in at a verified 1.64 million Scoville. Or to put it another way: Have you ever been challenged to eat a habanero, or tasted an all-habanero hot sauce? The average Scoville reading of a ripe habanero is roughly 100,000 to 300,000 Scoville, making it painfully hot, given that a jalapeno tops out around 8,000. Superhot is dedicated to those spice obsessives who throw themselves willingly into the world of what are referred to as “superhot chiles.” Variously defined as chile pepper breeds that can boast Scoville heat unit scores beyond 500,000 or 1 million, they’re essentially chiles as you or I would know them in the same way that a rocket vehicle blasting across a salt flat at 700 mph is technically a “car.” This is a deep dive into the much smaller subculture that goes far, far beyond those levels, to the borders of hell itself. But Hulu’s new docuseries Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People isn’t about that third of the population. Compartmentalize the results further, and you find that about a third of people identify as those who “love” spicy food, and consider themselves aficionados of heat. Granted, this no doubt includes many of us who think of “spicy” as a few dashes of Tabasco on our eggs, and probably a few sheepish folks who think of black pepper as a “hot and spicy” addition to their cuisine. According to polling and research, it is thought that roughly two-thirds of all Americans report that they enjoy spicy food, at least on some level. ![]()
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