When you eat super-hot foods regularly, your tolerance for the heat increases. Over time, it does so dramatically. For example, I’ve had to stop seasoning things to my satisfaction while I’m cooking, because a pot of chili that has “a little kick” to me has become inedible for Lea.
When I enjoyed CaJohn’s Mongoose hot sauce, which is conservatively estimated at 1,000,000 Scoville heat units, I began wondering if that shift was going to happen to my palate all the way up the Scoville scale to 16,000,000, which is the rating for pure capsaicin.
I’m not wondering that anymore. Never say never, I suppose, but the Carolina Reaper on Friday night felt like my ceiling, and it still feels like it after the weekend. I don’t know exactly how hot on the Scoville scale the pepper I ate was, of course. But it definitely seemed like more than 50% hotter than the Mongoose sauce. So I’m going to file it in my memory as a reasonable representation of 2,000,000 Scoville units.
There might be some wiggle room there for me to try a much smaller quantity of something slightly hotter, but for now I’m planting my flag here.
May the Carolina Reaper enjoy a long, long reign as the hottest pepper in the world. I do enjoy saying I’ve eaten the world’s hottest.
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