"For the general public, is a condiment," Currie said, when we spoke to him in 2018. He goes by Smokin' Ed, and he describes himself as owner, president, mad scientist and chef at PuckerButt Pepper Company in South Carolina. Which brings us to these questions: Why this pursuit of developing hotter and hotter peppers? And who is eating them?įor answers, it makes sense to go to the man responsible for developing both Pepper X and The Smokin' Ed Carolina Reaper (that's a trademarked name, by the way): Ed Currie. It took 10 years to develop as of 2020, Guinness World Records (which had earlier crowned the Carolina Reaper as the hottest pepper) had not yet confirmed that Pepper X was now the hottest pepper. In 2017, a new pepper, known only as Pepper X came on the scene, rating about 3.2 million Scoville units. Carolina Reapers rate 2.2 million on the Scoville heat scale. That honor officially belongs to the Carolina Reaper, which earned its title as the hottest pepper in the world - beating out a pepper called the Trinidad Scorpion - in 2013. To put things in perspective, that's at least 100 times hotter than a jalapeño, which ranks anywhere between about 2,500 and 8,000 Scoville units.īut ghost peppers aren't even the hottest. Ghost peppers, for those of you that don't know, are some of the hottest in the world and rate 1 million per pepper on the Scoville heat scale (a scientific measure of how hot a pepper is). For instance, in May 2017, a competitive eater who goes by the name LA Beast set a Guinness World Record for eating the most ghost peppers in two minutes - 13.
You may have seen one of those crazed contests on YouTube or at a fair where people "compete" to eat as many hot peppers as possible.
There are several different types of people who are attracted to eating super-hot peppers.