I'm not ready for this

[bellinghman]

'Hottest chilli sauce' launched.

Blair Lazar has now done a "16 Million Reserve", registered at 6,000,000 Scoville. Since his 2 A.M. sauce is already insanely hot at 600,000, this would seem over the top.

Happily for the safety of the world, it's limited edition - 999 bottles of an ounce each, or a total production of just over 62 pounds. At $300 per ounce, that's also pretty expensive, but given that it's not actually a sauce at all - it's purified, crystalline capsaicin for use as a food additive - this should be the end of the escalating heat wars.

EDIT: as drplokta points out, this is actually hardly news, being an article that's bubbled back onto the BBC site front page by dint of suddenly being emailed a lot.

EDIT: That may be because of this new article: Chillies heated ancient cuisine, apparently showing Ancient Ecuadorans of 400BC using the spice.

Comments

[drplokta]

That's a two year old article that has mysteriously just made it back to the top of the BBC's "most emailed" list on their news site.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Damn, so it is. I do so hate that feature - why it insists on showing the 'most emailed' over the 'most read', I do not know.

Edit applied.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Second edit - the actual new article is about chillies in ancient Ecuador.

[hobnobs.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was resurrected by the news that the Dorset Naga was apparently found to have a natural SHU rating of 1.6 million during recent heat tests. (Yet to be confirmed - http://www.dorsetnaga.com/ )

It could be that they're wonderng how hot they could get the "sauce" now. :)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Hmm, well.

Surely the Dorset Naga just has a higher proportion of capsaicin - and something which is already the purified chemical shouldn't get any hotter just because of a more concentrated source material.

(Though Scoville testing above a certain level gets very silly - you pretty well have to use low level homeopathic techniques to drop the concentration far enough.)

[hobnobs.livejournal.com]

>something which is already the purified chemical shouldn't get any hotter just because of a more concentrated source material

Yes, good point. Never actually thought about that did I? ;)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

There's a possibility for a variant chemical that just happens to be hotter, I suppose. Maybe an isotopic variant, even?

("That tritium shure packs a mean punch")