According to Guinness World Records, Pepper X, a tiny, wrinkled yellow-green pepper, is currently the hottest chili pepper in the world.
Ed Currie, the South Carolina-based PuckerButt Pepper Company’s founder, made an appearance on the Hot Ones YouTube series to accept the Guinness prize and introduce the world to the hot new type.
The Scoville Scale was the tool used by Guinness inspectors to gauge the potency of Pepper X. The scale, which was created in 1912, measures the concentration of capsaicinoids, which are chemicals that give peppers their spiciness.
An average of 2.693 million Scoville Heat Units is measured by Pepper X. In contrast, a serrano pepper can register between 10,000 and 23,000 SHUs, whereas a jalapeño pepper only registers 2,000 to 8,000 SHUs.
The Carolina Reaper, another Currie creation, held the previous record with an average of 1.64 million SHUs.
“But that scale’s logarithmic, so it’s more like three times hotter than a Reaper,” Currie said on the show.
Currie described the feeling of eating a whole Pepper X: “There’s an intense burn that happens immediately. Then your head kind of feels like, ‘Oh no! What’s going on?’ And then your body just starts reacting. You get it in your arms, you get it in your chest,” he said.
“It has no real throat burn like the Reaper, but that comes on later when you’re in pain.”
The white placenta inside peppers, which contains the seeds, is where most of the pepper’s heat is found. Guinness claims that the bumpy shell of Pepper X gives the placenta more room to grow.
Currie stated that Pepper X was stabilized by his team some ten years ago, and the reason for its release at this time was that no one had been able to surpass his prior record for the Carolina Reaper.
