The
Famous Chili Heat Scale Explained
How is the heat of a chilli measured?
In 1912 a chemist called Wilbur L. Scoville, devised a dilution method
to calculate how hot chillis were. He added equal parts of sugar water
to the capsicum oil until the burn could no longer be detected. The
very mild chillis could take as much a 1000 units before the burn
disappeared. Can you imagine the exercise when working out the rating
of the Red Savina Habanero, which achieves a rating in excess of 500
000 Scoville units. Nowadays chillis are measured using a separating
technique called High Pressure Liquid Chromatography. A measure of
extracted chilli juice is placed into the chromatograph machine, and
under high pressure, the machine separates the capsaicin from the
total volume of liquid and thus calculates the strength of the chilli.
What is all of that heat designed to do in nature?
Nature, as always, is wonderful! The most obvious reason for
why chillis burn is that the plant wants to disperse its seeds in
the most efficient way possible. The answer is birds! Birds don't
have trigeminal cells in their mouths throats or noses, as do mammals.
The seeds pass through a bird's digestive tract very quickly, and
are dispersed unharmed by digestive juices over a large area relatively
quickly. A mammal on the other hand is quite different. The seeds
hardly ever make it through the system whole and unscathed, because
of the powerful acidic gastric juices needed to break food down
during digestion. In a nutshell, chillis are trying their utmost
to stop us and other herbivores from eating them by producing capsaicin
oil as a repellent. I think that they have to rethink their strategy,
because it certainly isn't working with me. |
