Just recently, we’ve received a couple of emails from people about how to assess the heat level of food in regards to spiciness. You don’t have to be a food scientist to understand it anymore, so here’s an excerpt from an interesting article in the Winston-Salem Journal about one person’s journey to Scoville lucidity:

Scoville unit a pain-free way to judge chile’s heat

By Michael Hastings
JOURNAL FOOD EDITOR

I probably should have checked a chart of Scoville Heat Units before buying that Tabasco chile-pepper plant for my garden.

If I had, I might have decided that Tabasco peppers may be too hot for even my fire-loving taste buds.

A Scoville Heat Unit is a measurement for the spiciness of chile peppers. In 1912, a chemist named Walter Scoville came up with a way to rate the spicy heat of chiles.

The Scoville Organoleptic Test originally involved blending ground chiles with a series of increasingly diluted sugar and water solutions. A panel of tasters would taste the solutions, noting when they got to a solution that did not burn their mouths. Scoville then gave a number to the amount of dilution needed for each chile. The higher the number, the greater the heat.

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