Teary eyes? Burning throat? Is this how you respond if there’s a little too much jalapeno in your salsa?
Then you better steer clear of the Naga Viper, the new record holder for the spiciest chili pepper in the world. The farmer who is responsible for the pepper says that eating it is dangerous — and invigorating.
The Naga Viper scored 1,359,000 on the Scoville scale, which measures the piquancy of a chili pepper by examining the presence of capsaicin. (The scale is named after its creator, an American chemist named Wilbur Scoville.)
Consider this: On the Scoville scale, most common jalapeño peppers only score between 2,500 and 5,000.
The Bhut Jolokia, also called the Ghost Chili and the Naga Jolokia, is the previous record holder. “Naga” means cobra snake in Sanskrit, which indicates the region of the world where many of these varieties originate — India and its environs.
The Naga Viper is impressing pepper aficionados not just for its heat but for its origin, too. The world’s hottest peppers usually come from places where spicy food is the norm, like India. But the new record holder comes from a greenhouse in England.
The Naga Viper farmer crossed three extremely hot peppers – the Bhut Jolokia, the Naga Morich, and the Trinidad Scorpion – to create his masterpiece.
