How Hot is a Ghost Pepper? How many Scoville Units is a Ghost Pepper?

How Hot is a Ghost Pepper?

Peppers come in all shapes and sizes. Colorful bell peppers can be sweet, but other peppers are known for bringing in the heat and lighting your mouth on fire.

Peppers used for spice come in different levels of fiery kick. These levels are called Scoville units.

If you are wondering how hot the peppers you are consuming are, you can find that out by determining how many Scoville units it measures to be.

The more units, the hotter the pepper is. The units used for measuring the hotness of peppers are measured in Scoville Heat Units or SHU.

For example, a jalapeno pepper is relatively mild regarding levels of hotness tolerance. This is why the jalapeño pepper ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 SHU.

The scale was named after Wilbur L. Scoville (1865-1942). In 1912, Wilbur introduced the world to the Organoleptic Test to find the right leveled hotness in a dash of pepper for an ointment he was making.

The scale is keen on measuring the chemical compound in peppers that gives them the spicy heat or capsaicin that makes one’s tongue burn, ears hurt, and body sweat after a pepper is digested.

The seeds inside certain peppers have the most capsaicin and thus make them the hottest.

As intriguing as the name is, the ghost pepper ranks 10th on the Scoville scale for heat.

Ghost peppers can only be consumed by people with high spice tolerance.

How many Scoville Units is a Ghost Pepper?

Since the ghost pepper is so ferociously hot, it contains a frightful Scoville scale of about 1,041,427 SHU!

It is also 417% hotter than your everyday-jalapeno pepper. All this and more explain why the ghost pepper chip is used in tik-tok dares and pranks.

The unbearably hot pepper may be small in size, but its hotness is definitely out of this world. Bhut jolokia, popularly referred to as the ghost pepper, is a cross between Capsicum frutescens and Capsicum Chinese.

As of 2007, it was the hottest chili pepper in the world, according to Guinness World Records. Due to the number of news releases it received, Ghost Pepper was well-known in its day.

Only then did its following soar on YouTube and other social media platforms. And the “eat a full Ghost Pepper” challenge was no stopping.

Every day, chili heads were in a frenzy. Many people still mistakenly believe that the Ghost Pepper is still the World’s Hottest Pepper.