WACO, Texas (Ivanhoe Newswire) — you can find them in Mexican and Asian cuisine, hot sauce, medicines, even tear gas … Chile peppers put the heat in all kinds of products these days. Measured on a standard called the Scoville heat scale, they range from zero for a mild bell pepper to a scorching 100,000 for a habanera. But if you’d like to know how hot that pepper is before you take a bite, science may have the answer.

At La Fiesta, Sam Castillo’s Mexican restaurant in Waco, Texas, the secret to the hot sauce is the chilies. But, with these hot peppers, it’s not just about their color or size.

“Sometimes they’re hot,” Castillo told Ivanhoe. “Sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re really big. Sometimes they’re smaller. Tends to be the smaller the jalapeno the hotter it is. The only way you can really tell if the hot sauce has the right hotness to it is to taste it.”

Peppers are hot because of a family of chemicals called capsaicinoids. Using liquid chromatography, scientists can physically separate the specific chemicals that bring the heat from the pepper, but it can be expensive and time consuming.

Click here to read the rest of the source article from Ivanhoe Broadcast News and the American Institute of Physics