Some like it hot -- but some like it hotter.
There's hot sauce and then there's HOT sauce. However you like it, hot sauce has been around for ages and for some people, the hotter, the better. These saucy concoctions are made from some of the hottest peppers in the world, such as the naga jolokia pepper, or ghost pepper, which is rated at more than 1 million Scoville units or the naga viper at nearly 1.5 million Scoville heat units.
The Scoville Heat Scale
Scoville heat units are so named after Professor Wilbur Lincoln Scoville, a chemist with Parke-Davis pharmaceuticals. Professor Scoville developed a method for testing the heat in peppers using a ratio of one drop of water to one drop of pepper and continually adding water one drop at a time until the pepper no longer burned the mouths of test subjects. Therefore, a pepper that is rated 1 million Scoville heat units requires 1 million drops of water to neutralize the heat. Capsaicin is the element found in peppers that make them hot. Pure capsaicin can be extracted from chili peppers and, in its pure form, is rated at 16 million Scoville heat units making it 16 times hotter than the hottest pepper.
Hard-to-Find Hot Sauces
Ranked as the sixth hottest pepper in the world is the fatalii pepper, also known as "the devil's tongue." The fatalii pepper grows in Central and South Africa and has a 100,000 to 300,000 Scoville rating. Not just hot, the fatalii pepper also has hints of lemon and/or peach background flavors. Also from Africa, comes the African bird's eye pepper, also known as the peri-peri pepper. The peri-peri pepper is grown in Botswana and Zimbabwe and has a Scoville rating of 175 thousand. Peri-peri sauces can be purchased in various strengths ranging from mild to extremely hot.
The sauces made from fatalii and peri-peri are hard to find in retail outlets but can be purchased online.
Extreme Hot Sauce Brands
Extreme hot sauces are composed of a combination of several hot peppers, sometimes ground into powders or made into extracts, and flavored with spices, such as garlic and onion, and usually xanthium gum, for thickening. Mad Dog 357 is a combination of habanero, ghost pepper and peri-peri peppers. Try Da' Bomb which is made from ghost and habanero peppers along with powdered jolokia and habanero peppers and flavored with mango and lime. Other extreme hot sauce brands include Dave's Insanity Sauce, Anthony's Mad Dog Sauces, Ring of Fire Hot Sauce, Pappy's BBQ Sauce and Southwest Specialty Sauces.
Limited Editions and Collectors Hot Sauces
Blair Lozar is mentioned in the "Guiness Book of World records" for making some of the hottest sauces, with Scoville heat ratings of up to 16 million -- the equivalent of pure capsaicin. Blair's 16 Million Reserve is one such sauce and holds the distinction of being the hottest sauce on the planet with a 16 million Scoville heat rating. Blair only made 999 bottles of this sauce in 2006 which has now become a collectible item for hot sauce connoisseurs. Listed as a fantasy piece for collectors, Blair's 5AM Reserve came in at more than 7 million Scoville units and was sealed with Italian white and platinum wax. It was created for the serious hot sauce collector.
Tags: million Scoville, heat units, million Scoville heat, Scoville heat, Scoville heat units, fatalii pepper, made from