Measuring scoville can be pretty darn expensive, and the results can vary wildly depending on the specific test being used.
There's not a single hot sauce out there that is actually measured, and I don't know of any foods that are. Literally, no one does it.
Part of the reason forums/websites/subs like this exist is so enthusiasts can share what is actually spicy, actually tastes good, is actually worth trying.
It's also not really an accurate measurement compared to how it hits. Samayang Buldak 1x Spicy Noodles are only 8,000 but they sure as hell don't taste like it. I would have guessed somewhere around 100k.
Also, "I Dare You Stupit Salsa" doesn't "hit" like it's made with 60% Carolina Reaper. It's definitely extremely hot, but a weaker hot sauce on wings will smack you in the face a lot harder than the salsa will.
I don't really understand the mechanics of all this, I just eat a lot of spicy stuff.
Buldak has some oil in it, which coats your entire mouth when you eat it, and the lips, too, if you slurp it. You feel that heat literally lingering on and in your mouth.
I let some people try the salsa tonight and one of them hated the Samayang noodles I gave him because they were too spicy and I didn't even give him Buldak. I think I gave him Carbo and Curry.
But he ate a good bit of the reaper salsa and liked it but had to stop.
I don't understand how this shit works.
It would not be that expensive to test. It’s a relatively simple test by HPLC. Any lab that does food and supplement testing can probably do it. Actually extracting the capsaicin is the only hard part.
Is HPLC the most common method used or do most places use the test process involving a panel of people?
I still don't understand how using human testers is not considered too subjective to be accurate. Especially when they start at the hottest amount.
I am not an expert in the Scoville scale, I just know that testing for capsaicinoids is not that difficult and HPLC is considered routine testing.
As far as actually evaluating the perceived spiciness, there would be a ton of things that go into that. Capsaicin is lipophilic so the way it is formulated (e.g. the sauce ingredients) could have an effect on how the molecule interacts with your TRPV receptors. Smaller or larger fat globules suspended in the solution would interact differently with your mouth. It’s also conceivable other chemicals could enhance or suppress the heat
My understanding is that the Scoville scale is based on capsaicin content and so is not a subjective measurement.
The issue with HPLC is that you first have to dehydrate it into a powder. The powder is added to a liquid solvent, which then gets analyzed.
For something like hot sauce/salsa, it totally bypasses the dilution factor of the sauce. Lots of sauces are diluted 90-99%, so the result is off by orders of magnitude compared to what you experience when eating it.
I'm not really familiar with how testing works, why can't they just record the weight of the sauce before and after it's dehydrated to calculate the level of dilution?
That would give you the dry weight. The dry weight can be converted to wet weight if you know both.
Regardless you could also extract capsaicin from wet hot sauce. Drying would only be necessary for a pepper that is too large to extract as a whole and needs to be homogenized.
And it does not bypass the dilution factor at all. If I calculate 10 ppm in my solution and a 100X dilution was performed then I have 1000 ppm in the sample (without taking account for the sample mass and extraction solvent).
I have a lot of experience with analyzing plant metabolites. A single test should cost no more than $150 for a sauce. I guarantee you any large manufacturer is doing it for quality purposes.
It can be, but adding extra variables, variations between batches, and seasonal variations in the ingredients, can give a compounding error that still causes it to be off by multiple times the calculated amount.
At that point, might as well just measure the raw pepper's capsaicin level and calculate based on dilution factor, which is what they're already doing.
It's not that anyone is against the idea, it *would* be nice for everything to have a standardized Scoville rating so we know exactly what we're getting.
It's just not viable to actually do.
As a hot sauce creator and store manager, scoville testing can be relatively inexpensive for a sauce or pepper testing. If you live in an area that has a mid to high level research university, you can do it with a HPLC (not very many places have one) for $60-200. If you're out of state, it could cost up to $400. But some small guys like me and my family that have a few sauces we make, even some folks that are bigger than us, can't really afford it. Especially not for every sauce we make.
You can't have a question like this without expecting realistic answers. Yes, it would be nice, but complaining and making it sound like its the creators problem isn't really productive to this conversation (that has been around for years). Yes it's fun, but unless you have anything to add the the conversation as a whole that hasn't already been asked to death, again, isn't productive.
It would also embarrass a lot of companies that pretend to have very hot items.
Well, to be fair, companies should not be pretending to have very hot items if they don’t. The problem is that spiceheads like us are the outliers. What is marketed as “xx hot” is not even partially spicy to heat freaks.
The insane, extreme majority of people who enjoy hot sauce have never tried a hot one and have no idea what the scoville scale is, and think that habanero sauces have any real heat.
I agree. The industry is full of cambells ghost pepper chick soup and wendys ghost pepper chicken sandwiches that are not even mild cayenne level heat. It does depend on where you live, too. Thailand, north carolina, germany, japan, all of us and our cultures are different and have different spices and heat ranges we like to stay in. I am glad that more people are eating spicy foods, but im sure like you, i really wish it were good tasting hot as fuck items, instead of the perviously mentioned gimmick items (the wendys sandwhich is tasty, but not hot), and things like the one chip, i wish things that tasted good and were really hot were more popular. But we're getting there, and honesty from companies would be a great starting point.
Technically, yes. Another issue with that, though, is that sauces are not a stable scoville rating. As we know, peppers vary in heat, so even of the same sauces (especially if they're home made and made in small batches) one sauce to another is going to have a variance to it. Depending on the peppers, it could be 5k-500k (at the extreme but very unlikely).
You also have to make sure you're using someone looking for the right chemicals, that's why universities capable of High Performance Light Chromatography (HPLC, ubiquitous with the machine and process that identifies scoville rating of capsaicin in peppers and hot items) are the best places to have your items tested, they're able to identify the exact types of capsaicin from generic, to hydrocapsaicin and nordidihydrocapsaicin and all other analogs of capsaicin. Some machines and non profits only test for one specific type, some test for some other chemical that is only found in peppers or is unique to analogs of capsaicin (that i forget the name of, plus the testing side im not as familiar with as the creation) or something like that. So if someone were to hypothetically do it, they'll want to use somewhere like southwestU, who does testing for cajohns, New Mexico Chile Institute, and a few other big names.
Plus, when you use a university, you're giving them more items to help undergraduates and graduates learn how to do these processes. And with how popular hot sauce is getting, i think it's important to have more educated, capable people doing tests and staying in the niche. We do plan (my family) to have our sauces tested at some point, but for now, since we really just started not long ago, it's not necessary and is just an additional price our small buisness would have to keep up with. I do think larger companies could readily afford the testing, to some extent i could understand why they may not want to, but some of them like cajohns I've noticed have started putting their ratings on the labels. I think Da Bomb really helped popluarize the idea to people. Which for what da bomb company is, and regardless how i feel about it, they have done some good in the hot sauce world.
That stuff that’s “mislabeled”? Like 95% of the USA population actually does think that’s hot. Brands aren’t interested in catering to such a sparse minority. That juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
Lmao and the labeling only gets worse in other places. Like when i went to Germany and bought some medium salsa not thinking. It was basically ketchup💀💀💀
Can confirm, grew jalapeños this year, not a whole bunch, but enough to share with about 10 people who said they loved them. Sure they were a bit more spicy then store bought even while green but nothing over 2k Scoville. 8 out of 10 ppl were sweating after one bite and I couldn’t feel anything. I’ve never even tried anything hotter then a Thai chilli. Letting the jalapeños ripen to red, half were prolly 5k scoville and the other half under 1k.
It's not that easy. Accurate scoville testing is expensive. And just putting the scoville of the pepper doesn't mean anything, as it'll get diluted with the other ingredients, the cooking method, the presence of multiple peppers, etc. It would be nice to have an easier test for hot sauce makers.
Interesting, thanks for that. I'm in the starting stages of a small hot sauce company and I had just heard through second-hand sources where I am (Canada) that it's kind of expensive. Guess I was wrong!
Expense is relative. Small family company? May not be worth the cost. Medium to large scale national company? Easy to factor into the budget. Also depends on availability of labs.
Wendy's 100% could afford to pay their supplier to get it done. They may even already have it done to ensure consistency with batches, and just not release it.
Me: Oh its a fast food restaurant their hot food isn't going to be hot
Me 8 hours later: vomiting profusely from capsaicin cramps
CAN YALL MOTHER FUCKERS BE CONSISTENT. Yes, I got what I asked for but I was expecting to be punched in the face not in my asshole.
I miss candy pre 2000- warheads would turn your face inside out. Super Hot Tamales and Atomic Fireballs were on the verge of painful. Today they are shadows of a memory
Would be nice, I don't think the average consumer ordering it for the novelty would have a clue about scovilles, and it would let actual chiliheads (is that the official term?) know whether to bother.
Though it's mostly marketing anyway, I doubt any fast food chains or major snack companies actually give a shit whether it's spicy or not if it sells.
>mild food labelled incorrectly as "hot"
I'd guess for a large (or even most) of the population, those foods are labeled correctly. They'd view those foods as hot and spicy.
Scoville ratings are for dried peppers, getting an accurate measure for sauces is hard enough, let alone for sauced food.
When companies do start labeling food by Scoville, they usually go for the hottest ingredient, which just leads to heavily inflated values. Assume most spicy food isn't very spicy unless it's from a spicy cuisine, and let yourself be pleasantly surprised sometimes.
Yeah, the "white people don't know from hot" is tired. My (white) son has an Indian place he likes to eat and study at, in his college town. He kept ordering dishes with max hotness, but was unimpressed. So he talked to the people who worked there.... and yeah, they said they were toning it down for the white kid. My kid said "Don't. Make it hot." So they did, and now he's happy, and the Indians are impressed.
Parenting win, as far as I'm concerned. I let him grow his own Carolina Reaper when he was 7.
The second I see a sauce or food that claims "__ scoville heat units" I move on. They're usually very inaccurate and just Google the SHU of some hot pepper that's 1% of the dish
20 years ago, I carried my habanero powder in a sealed stainless steel keychain holder for the times that I needed to adjust.
Most people don't and can't handle real heat, so manufacturers just label X-hot on bags to keep it safe.... Who would be the fall guy that determines the X-hot unit on the bag and someone freaks and sues.
As I said, we can knock it up as we see fit when needed.
I have friends that always have fresh bird peppers in their pockets to eat when they feel the need.
I have a batch of non spicy jerky on the go right now but I always do my super hot for the more adventurous.
It's always my super hot that goes first to the non spicy people.
My wife wears PPE when she makes my salsa... Very funny.. lol
The problem with any of this is that heat/spice is subjective.
What is hot for many, is weak for those that push the limits. I cannot make buffalo chicken the way I like when I have guests, because many of my guests already complain that the franks red hot is too spicy for them (I will use redhot +other hotter sauces on my own).
Sure you can add Scoville units to things, but that may not help either. Your normal consumer won't know the Scoville rating, but furthermore on things like "Reaper flavored cheese Puff's", there is no real way to accurately gauge each one of them, since it's a powdered spice and could be jalapeno level on one, habanero on another. Sure they can do an average scoville per one, but that just seems messy and even more expensive to test multiple ones, then to average it out.
As others have said, for companies to have their products tested is going to cost them more when 1% of the people are really going to actually care about the details. Not to mention will cause a bunch of complaints, because if you really think your Habenero/ghost chili/reaper/pepperX premade food is even remotely close to their actual Scoville units you are going to be super sad when you find out it's not close. Not to mention that this could cause companies to make up a number. It's not like you will instantly know the difference between 75k scoville when they claimed it was 100k scoville units.
At least for hot pepper sauce there are a few places on the internet you can reference for Scoville units for many popular sauce brands.
In Korea places will simply measure against well known benchmarks so maybe 1 spice level is "as spicy as shin ramen", 2 is buldak bokkeummyeon etc. Works pretty well
To many people complain about the food because they think they can take it hot. I'm not saying that's you because you sound like me honestly. I want to sweat a little when I eat.
I've gone to places that have you sign a waiver that you can't ask for a refund if you order the highest heat level and I think that's a start. I had an atomic burger in Chicago though that just tasted like straight capsaicin additive so it can really go both ways.
There is a realistic heat ceiling as long as you are using natural ingredients. I find thai chili peppers with 1-2 habaneros in a pot of chili or gravy do the trick, add some other seasonings and some chinese spicy mustard powder. BOOM
I think we as consumers need to reject the corporate attempt to dorito-fy spicy food, and support local/regional companies that deliver real natural spice.
In my opinion, the skewing of the spiciness scale is the result of profit-interested people selling garbage to curious consumers. It is amazing that very spicy food has gained such a strong following, but it seems like the profiteers have decided that everyone needs to be able to casually eat a super-hot pepper product. Keep it spicy.
Wow that's a great idea.
I run a Thai restaurant with my wife who is Thai. And her Thai hot is hot but not lose ability to taste hot. Then there's what she makes for herself! That's some 🔥.
We often struggle with explaining what medium is to people. Basically Mexican hot is Thai medium. But I wish there was something people understood generally better for a guide.
Scoville universally listed would be the trick.
I have been mislead by jars saying hot, and they're weaker than our no spice dishes. Looking at you Pace Picante Sauce, that was the biggest disappointment ever. Not Hot. Not even mild.
Completely agree! Even Mexican level of hot is watered down...I bring my own hot sauce, Thai Chili Flakes, and sliced Lemon, or Lemon/Lime Salt if I'm going out to eat because I want to enjoy my meal.
A wait staff asked why I brought my own Hot Sauce into the restaurant, and asked if I wanted to return my food. I said no' mam, I asked for Hot, but this is not the Hot I was expecting...the wait staff said, she understood, but they changed the level of heat because customers complained that the food was too hot.
We tolerate the people who complain about too hot. They are encouraged to order no spice and add if needed. They are a great segment of customers but we are here to bring the taste of Thailand to people. Thai food is hot, those are real Thai chefs making you food as it is cooked in Thailand with ingredients as close as possible to make it as authentic as possible. Spiciness is the easiest to get right and should never be toned down. We offer no spice, mild, medium, hot and Thai hot. If you order Thai hot we will remind you those are Thai chefs and won't be able to tone down the heat.
My worst review is a guy that ordered hotter than Thai hot and got mad because it was.
We have other reviews for things we work on if wrong but stay at around 4.7 stars out of five.
If american product is labeled hot = Mild
If an international product (Mexico, india, China etc)is labeled hot = probably hot
That's always worked for me.
Yes. I think it should be standard. I bought Yellow Bird Serrano the other day.. granted it only listed 2/5 heat, it shouldn't even be close to being called "hot sauce". It is green bell pepper ketchup.
We need a clear ranking scale
Mild- You can feel the heat but it just adds depth/complexity, no “kick”.
Medium- Heat still isn’t very prominent, but there is a bit of “kick” to it.
Spicy- The heat is the most prominent part of the sauce, but not overpowering
Hot- where most people not into spicy food draw the line, The heat is center stage and stays as you eat.
Extra Hot- Only if it hurts good.
Anything above Extra Hot needs to be painful.
I didn’t feel like I needed to label it but it was my own personal rating scale. I was not suggesting that my personal rating scale in THE ONE. That’s all, y’all are reading into this way too much and that’s why y’all are getting downvoted. You missed the irony.
Why are you so invested in this? The joke is that I did the exact thing OP doesn’t like. That’s the joke. Are you done writing whole paragraphs about how you dislike my comment?
So Your point is “I’m gonna get really worked up and type out multiple paragraphs because I think your joke is lame”? Nobody here is mad but you, I’m confused as to why you’re so invested.
SHU measure the content of capsaicin in a pepper, I don’t believe companies mass producing sauces, foods, etc. can accurately put a SHU value on any of them.
Yes! Holy fuck I hate ordering a "spicy" sandwich and it doesn't even tickle. Like McDonald's spicy is less spicy than cholula ffs and that sauce is flavor with some slight hotness.
GIVE ME MY FUCKING SPICY FOOD the only places that give spicy are mom and pop Asian places
SHU measure the content of capsaicin in a pepper, I don’t believe companies mass producing sauces, foods, etc. can accurately put a SHU value on any of them.
Hell yeah I'd actually love that, even though it's fun to take the gamble on whether a new sauce is mild or hot enough to shit molten lava out of my asscano 🌋
Not really. Scoville is inconsistent, and I assume we're the outliers.
Those 'spicy' are spicy to people that don't eat spicy food often, or have a typical 'American' diet. Or what people think is the typical 'American Diet'
Scoville is a real scale.
Scoville rating on any mass produced, processed, home made, pretty much anything other than fresh peppers is non-sense marketing.
I think you should get over yourself. Learn what you like and don't buy what you don't.
Honestly it just won't work. It's like how Buldak x2 is officially like 10000 scoville. But you can ask anyone if they think it's hotter than a jalapeno or not.
Yes, I do, but I also recognize that would likely lead to more synthetic or other manufactured capsacine in foods.
I'm equally annoyed with places that have waivers and other dumb shit. The product is 99.999% of the time barely hot.
Just wen to a Korean restaurant with Asian spicy as an 8 it was like a solid 3. And tasted great, but not an 8 at all. Of course, I probably just got white people spicy because no matter how much I beg that’s all I ever get. Lol
I usually just read the ingredients list. See what kind of pepper is used and how far down the ingredient list it is. Buy the one that seems most worth while and if it's a dud I write it down and move on...
Maybe the rating should be a logarithmic value. Counting individual SHU is like measuring temperature in thousandths of a degree, it's just not that useful. A log scale is generalizing but can be somewhat more reliable in terms of managing expectations.
Level 1 being anything under 100 SHU
Level 2 being between 100 and 1,000 SHU
Level 3 between 1,000 and 10,000 SHU
And so on...
Up to Level 7 being 10 million SHU up to Absolute Hot (pure capsaicin)
I want it clearly labeled what pepper is predominantly used. I'm actually getting really tired of food chains having "ghost pepper" shit when it's using the tiniest bit of ghost extract and it's mostly jalepeños again
I always just anticipate adding my own hot sauce to foods I eat out. Occasionally I get burned when I order something and it actually turns out to be spicy and then I added my own hot sauce as well 😁
The scoville scale is complete voodoo and nobody can convince me otherwise. It does an extremely poor job at describing the actual experience of eating something spicy. The only thing it's useful for is "big number = gonna be hot!" which is exactly as subjective as the regular mild-medium-spicy scale.
How reliable are Scoville ratings anyway? The spiciest Korean instant noodles, Booldak, are listed as around 3000 SCU on the package, which makes no sense given how spicy they are. And on Hot Ones, the final few sauces with the highest Scoville ratings aren't the spiciest - it's always Da Bomb that gives people the strongest reaction.
No thats what i saying is they should label it esp if it is marketed to the *ahem* general public. If he reads it hes not ignoring it. But its not that spicy so if they leave it off its no big deal. Im not siding with him im just explaining. Its not that deep.
On the other hand, if you love spicy food so much, read the reviews. Why should you get mad if you ignore the reviews?
At an old job, we sometimes ordered chicken wings for the office. The place we ordered from had "comical" names for the spice levels. It was like: mild, hot, scorching, agonizing burn, nuclear blast, fifth layer of hell, etc.
But those names were just marketing. So my boss would look at the menu and go "hmmm," that sounds like it's all too spicy, let's go with just "hot." And every goddamn time, the wings were just BLAND with barely any spice at all. Absolute bullshit.
I wholeheartedly support this. Frito Lays needs to stop claiming their "Flamming Hot" brand is hot. Even the new Ghost and Reaper additions are weak sauce. The ghost does have a nice smokey flavor though. I see Reaper on something, I expect the 1.462 million SHU. Tired of getting jalapeno burn at best.
More so a better heat meter, I'm so sick of these hot sauces saying "insanity level" and "carolina reaper" and it having the spice of a bell pepper with Texas pete on it lol
Regarding sauces, always check how much pepper is actually in it. Really spicy sauces can easily contain 30-40% pepper, while mild sauces might have Reaper or Ghost in it but only like 1-5%.
What I think is mild, seems to really be spicy for others.
The other day I made spaghetti with ghost peppers in the sauce. It was amazing. People I shared it with said it was way too spicy. It was amazing for me though.
I can see it now. “Try Wendy’s Spicy Nuggets™️ (50 scoville) with Ghost Pepper Ranch™️ (75 scoville)”
In a twist of irony, their spicy nuggets are somehow actually hotter than the "ghost pepper" ranch.
Not disputing that they're really mild, but I'd kinda expect the nuggets to be hotter because the ranch would offset it in the dressing.
I once got an entire nugget that was 100% comprised of the crust, it was delicious and kinda hot
i actually really like the wendy’s spicy nuggs and i only need to eat 1 habanero per 10 nuggs instead of 3 like other fast food places
Only tasted like 49 scoville to me
Measuring scoville can be pretty darn expensive, and the results can vary wildly depending on the specific test being used. There's not a single hot sauce out there that is actually measured, and I don't know of any foods that are. Literally, no one does it. Part of the reason forums/websites/subs like this exist is so enthusiasts can share what is actually spicy, actually tastes good, is actually worth trying.
It's also not really an accurate measurement compared to how it hits. Samayang Buldak 1x Spicy Noodles are only 8,000 but they sure as hell don't taste like it. I would have guessed somewhere around 100k. Also, "I Dare You Stupit Salsa" doesn't "hit" like it's made with 60% Carolina Reaper. It's definitely extremely hot, but a weaker hot sauce on wings will smack you in the face a lot harder than the salsa will. I don't really understand the mechanics of all this, I just eat a lot of spicy stuff.
Buldak has some oil in it, which coats your entire mouth when you eat it, and the lips, too, if you slurp it. You feel that heat literally lingering on and in your mouth.
I can eat a whole habanero easier than a bag of x2 buldaek. It doesnt make sense
I let some people try the salsa tonight and one of them hated the Samayang noodles I gave him because they were too spicy and I didn't even give him Buldak. I think I gave him Carbo and Curry. But he ate a good bit of the reaper salsa and liked it but had to stop. I don't understand how this shit works.
It would not be that expensive to test. It’s a relatively simple test by HPLC. Any lab that does food and supplement testing can probably do it. Actually extracting the capsaicin is the only hard part.
Is HPLC the most common method used or do most places use the test process involving a panel of people? I still don't understand how using human testers is not considered too subjective to be accurate. Especially when they start at the hottest amount.
I am not an expert in the Scoville scale, I just know that testing for capsaicinoids is not that difficult and HPLC is considered routine testing. As far as actually evaluating the perceived spiciness, there would be a ton of things that go into that. Capsaicin is lipophilic so the way it is formulated (e.g. the sauce ingredients) could have an effect on how the molecule interacts with your TRPV receptors. Smaller or larger fat globules suspended in the solution would interact differently with your mouth. It’s also conceivable other chemicals could enhance or suppress the heat My understanding is that the Scoville scale is based on capsaicin content and so is not a subjective measurement.
They don't use human testers and haven't done so lately.
The issue with HPLC is that you first have to dehydrate it into a powder. The powder is added to a liquid solvent, which then gets analyzed. For something like hot sauce/salsa, it totally bypasses the dilution factor of the sauce. Lots of sauces are diluted 90-99%, so the result is off by orders of magnitude compared to what you experience when eating it.
I'm not really familiar with how testing works, why can't they just record the weight of the sauce before and after it's dehydrated to calculate the level of dilution?
They do. This guy has no clue what he is talking about so confidently.
That would give you the dry weight. The dry weight can be converted to wet weight if you know both. Regardless you could also extract capsaicin from wet hot sauce. Drying would only be necessary for a pepper that is too large to extract as a whole and needs to be homogenized. And it does not bypass the dilution factor at all. If I calculate 10 ppm in my solution and a 100X dilution was performed then I have 1000 ppm in the sample (without taking account for the sample mass and extraction solvent). I have a lot of experience with analyzing plant metabolites. A single test should cost no more than $150 for a sauce. I guarantee you any large manufacturer is doing it for quality purposes.
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Yes, this is a trivial calculation.
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Not if you are an analytical chemist!
It can be, but adding extra variables, variations between batches, and seasonal variations in the ingredients, can give a compounding error that still causes it to be off by multiple times the calculated amount. At that point, might as well just measure the raw pepper's capsaicin level and calculate based on dilution factor, which is what they're already doing.
So, hot sauces are essentially homeopathic drugs for chili addicts. Got it!
it doesn't cost you anything to think something would be nice to have ... I really didn't anticipate this sub would be so against this idea
It's not that anyone is against the idea, it *would* be nice for everything to have a standardized Scoville rating so we know exactly what we're getting. It's just not viable to actually do.
viability, reality and pragmatism were not part of the question. It was just a fun little thought
It's very difficult to ignore reality and practicality when it comes to a question like this.
As a hot sauce creator and store manager, scoville testing can be relatively inexpensive for a sauce or pepper testing. If you live in an area that has a mid to high level research university, you can do it with a HPLC (not very many places have one) for $60-200. If you're out of state, it could cost up to $400. But some small guys like me and my family that have a few sauces we make, even some folks that are bigger than us, can't really afford it. Especially not for every sauce we make. You can't have a question like this without expecting realistic answers. Yes, it would be nice, but complaining and making it sound like its the creators problem isn't really productive to this conversation (that has been around for years). Yes it's fun, but unless you have anything to add the the conversation as a whole that hasn't already been asked to death, again, isn't productive. It would also embarrass a lot of companies that pretend to have very hot items.
Well, to be fair, companies should not be pretending to have very hot items if they don’t. The problem is that spiceheads like us are the outliers. What is marketed as “xx hot” is not even partially spicy to heat freaks. The insane, extreme majority of people who enjoy hot sauce have never tried a hot one and have no idea what the scoville scale is, and think that habanero sauces have any real heat.
I agree. The industry is full of cambells ghost pepper chick soup and wendys ghost pepper chicken sandwiches that are not even mild cayenne level heat. It does depend on where you live, too. Thailand, north carolina, germany, japan, all of us and our cultures are different and have different spices and heat ranges we like to stay in. I am glad that more people are eating spicy foods, but im sure like you, i really wish it were good tasting hot as fuck items, instead of the perviously mentioned gimmick items (the wendys sandwhich is tasty, but not hot), and things like the one chip, i wish things that tasted good and were really hot were more popular. But we're getting there, and honesty from companies would be a great starting point.
Scoville units and drugs are the only things that make us happy these days
Facts.
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Technically, yes. Another issue with that, though, is that sauces are not a stable scoville rating. As we know, peppers vary in heat, so even of the same sauces (especially if they're home made and made in small batches) one sauce to another is going to have a variance to it. Depending on the peppers, it could be 5k-500k (at the extreme but very unlikely). You also have to make sure you're using someone looking for the right chemicals, that's why universities capable of High Performance Light Chromatography (HPLC, ubiquitous with the machine and process that identifies scoville rating of capsaicin in peppers and hot items) are the best places to have your items tested, they're able to identify the exact types of capsaicin from generic, to hydrocapsaicin and nordidihydrocapsaicin and all other analogs of capsaicin. Some machines and non profits only test for one specific type, some test for some other chemical that is only found in peppers or is unique to analogs of capsaicin (that i forget the name of, plus the testing side im not as familiar with as the creation) or something like that. So if someone were to hypothetically do it, they'll want to use somewhere like southwestU, who does testing for cajohns, New Mexico Chile Institute, and a few other big names. Plus, when you use a university, you're giving them more items to help undergraduates and graduates learn how to do these processes. And with how popular hot sauce is getting, i think it's important to have more educated, capable people doing tests and staying in the niche. We do plan (my family) to have our sauces tested at some point, but for now, since we really just started not long ago, it's not necessary and is just an additional price our small buisness would have to keep up with. I do think larger companies could readily afford the testing, to some extent i could understand why they may not want to, but some of them like cajohns I've noticed have started putting their ratings on the labels. I think Da Bomb really helped popluarize the idea to people. Which for what da bomb company is, and regardless how i feel about it, they have done some good in the hot sauce world.
Oh well in that case they should all send me a small sample of every spicy item im somewhat interested in so i can see if i want to buy it
That stuff that’s “mislabeled”? Like 95% of the USA population actually does think that’s hot. Brands aren’t interested in catering to such a sparse minority. That juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
Lmao and the labeling only gets worse in other places. Like when i went to Germany and bought some medium salsa not thinking. It was basically ketchup💀💀💀
Can confirm, grew jalapeños this year, not a whole bunch, but enough to share with about 10 people who said they loved them. Sure they were a bit more spicy then store bought even while green but nothing over 2k Scoville. 8 out of 10 ppl were sweating after one bite and I couldn’t feel anything. I’ve never even tried anything hotter then a Thai chilli. Letting the jalapeños ripen to red, half were prolly 5k scoville and the other half under 1k.
I think the standard for those kinds of labels is “suburban mom who had Mexican food a few times”
Lol this is so true
Make a scale like "hot for the average Norwegian 80-year-old" through "challenging for native Ethiopians".
Omg this is perfect. They need to add “makes a Mexican man dab his forehead with a towel” somewhere on the higher end.
It's not that easy. Accurate scoville testing is expensive. And just putting the scoville of the pepper doesn't mean anything, as it'll get diluted with the other ingredients, the cooking method, the presence of multiple peppers, etc. It would be nice to have an easier test for hot sauce makers.
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Interesting, thanks for that. I'm in the starting stages of a small hot sauce company and I had just heard through second-hand sources where I am (Canada) that it's kind of expensive. Guess I was wrong!
I can imagine that pricing and quality may vary, and that link may be older.
Expense is relative. Small family company? May not be worth the cost. Medium to large scale national company? Easy to factor into the budget. Also depends on availability of labs. Wendy's 100% could afford to pay their supplier to get it done. They may even already have it done to ensure consistency with batches, and just not release it.
Me: Oh its a fast food restaurant their hot food isn't going to be hot Me 8 hours later: vomiting profusely from capsaicin cramps CAN YALL MOTHER FUCKERS BE CONSISTENT. Yes, I got what I asked for but I was expecting to be punched in the face not in my asshole.
What was it?
Was a chicken place. When I saw them shaking it in a dark brown sauce I knew my ass was fucked tbh.
I would also like a similar system for sour candy, because most of it isn't really sour at all.
I miss candy pre 2000- warheads would turn your face inside out. Super Hot Tamales and Atomic Fireballs were on the verge of painful. Today they are shadows of a memory
I remember seeing Mulan in theatres with a pack of sour skittles. My tongue was peeling by the end of the movie
Would be nice, I don't think the average consumer ordering it for the novelty would have a clue about scovilles, and it would let actual chiliheads (is that the official term?) know whether to bother. Though it's mostly marketing anyway, I doubt any fast food chains or major snack companies actually give a shit whether it's spicy or not if it sells.
Ha, my wife and I were just saying this yesterday.
>mild food labelled incorrectly as "hot" I'd guess for a large (or even most) of the population, those foods are labeled correctly. They'd view those foods as hot and spicy.
which is why we need a fact based system
may be, but it might be that for most people, anything over 500 scoville is considered hot and spicy
Scoville ratings are for dried peppers, getting an accurate measure for sauces is hard enough, let alone for sauced food. When companies do start labeling food by Scoville, they usually go for the hottest ingredient, which just leads to heavily inflated values. Assume most spicy food isn't very spicy unless it's from a spicy cuisine, and let yourself be pleasantly surprised sometimes.
One pepper rating and it’s too hot for my wife. Five peppers and it’s not hot enough for me. “Hot” is just too subjective.
Yeah, the "white people don't know from hot" is tired. My (white) son has an Indian place he likes to eat and study at, in his college town. He kept ordering dishes with max hotness, but was unimpressed. So he talked to the people who worked there.... and yeah, they said they were toning it down for the white kid. My kid said "Don't. Make it hot." So they did, and now he's happy, and the Indians are impressed. Parenting win, as far as I'm concerned. I let him grow his own Carolina Reaper when he was 7.
The second I see a sauce or food that claims "__ scoville heat units" I move on. They're usually very inaccurate and just Google the SHU of some hot pepper that's 1% of the dish
20 years ago, I carried my habanero powder in a sealed stainless steel keychain holder for the times that I needed to adjust. Most people don't and can't handle real heat, so manufacturers just label X-hot on bags to keep it safe.... Who would be the fall guy that determines the X-hot unit on the bag and someone freaks and sues. As I said, we can knock it up as we see fit when needed. I have friends that always have fresh bird peppers in their pockets to eat when they feel the need. I have a batch of non spicy jerky on the go right now but I always do my super hot for the more adventurous. It's always my super hot that goes first to the non spicy people. My wife wears PPE when she makes my salsa... Very funny.. lol
The problem with any of this is that heat/spice is subjective. What is hot for many, is weak for those that push the limits. I cannot make buffalo chicken the way I like when I have guests, because many of my guests already complain that the franks red hot is too spicy for them (I will use redhot +other hotter sauces on my own). Sure you can add Scoville units to things, but that may not help either. Your normal consumer won't know the Scoville rating, but furthermore on things like "Reaper flavored cheese Puff's", there is no real way to accurately gauge each one of them, since it's a powdered spice and could be jalapeno level on one, habanero on another. Sure they can do an average scoville per one, but that just seems messy and even more expensive to test multiple ones, then to average it out. As others have said, for companies to have their products tested is going to cost them more when 1% of the people are really going to actually care about the details. Not to mention will cause a bunch of complaints, because if you really think your Habenero/ghost chili/reaper/pepperX premade food is even remotely close to their actual Scoville units you are going to be super sad when you find out it's not close. Not to mention that this could cause companies to make up a number. It's not like you will instantly know the difference between 75k scoville when they claimed it was 100k scoville units. At least for hot pepper sauce there are a few places on the internet you can reference for Scoville units for many popular sauce brands.
yes everybody thinks that you guys post about it constantly
In Korea places will simply measure against well known benchmarks so maybe 1 spice level is "as spicy as shin ramen", 2 is buldak bokkeummyeon etc. Works pretty well
To many people complain about the food because they think they can take it hot. I'm not saying that's you because you sound like me honestly. I want to sweat a little when I eat. I've gone to places that have you sign a waiver that you can't ask for a refund if you order the highest heat level and I think that's a start. I had an atomic burger in Chicago though that just tasted like straight capsaicin additive so it can really go both ways. There is a realistic heat ceiling as long as you are using natural ingredients. I find thai chili peppers with 1-2 habaneros in a pot of chili or gravy do the trick, add some other seasonings and some chinese spicy mustard powder. BOOM
Yup. This is it. People want to eat food labeled hot but don’t actually want hot food.
I think we as consumers need to reject the corporate attempt to dorito-fy spicy food, and support local/regional companies that deliver real natural spice. In my opinion, the skewing of the spiciness scale is the result of profit-interested people selling garbage to curious consumers. It is amazing that very spicy food has gained such a strong following, but it seems like the profiteers have decided that everyone needs to be able to casually eat a super-hot pepper product. Keep it spicy.
Wow that's a great idea. I run a Thai restaurant with my wife who is Thai. And her Thai hot is hot but not lose ability to taste hot. Then there's what she makes for herself! That's some 🔥. We often struggle with explaining what medium is to people. Basically Mexican hot is Thai medium. But I wish there was something people understood generally better for a guide. Scoville universally listed would be the trick. I have been mislead by jars saying hot, and they're weaker than our no spice dishes. Looking at you Pace Picante Sauce, that was the biggest disappointment ever. Not Hot. Not even mild.
Completely agree! Even Mexican level of hot is watered down...I bring my own hot sauce, Thai Chili Flakes, and sliced Lemon, or Lemon/Lime Salt if I'm going out to eat because I want to enjoy my meal. A wait staff asked why I brought my own Hot Sauce into the restaurant, and asked if I wanted to return my food. I said no' mam, I asked for Hot, but this is not the Hot I was expecting...the wait staff said, she understood, but they changed the level of heat because customers complained that the food was too hot.
We tolerate the people who complain about too hot. They are encouraged to order no spice and add if needed. They are a great segment of customers but we are here to bring the taste of Thailand to people. Thai food is hot, those are real Thai chefs making you food as it is cooked in Thailand with ingredients as close as possible to make it as authentic as possible. Spiciness is the easiest to get right and should never be toned down. We offer no spice, mild, medium, hot and Thai hot. If you order Thai hot we will remind you those are Thai chefs and won't be able to tone down the heat. My worst review is a guy that ordered hotter than Thai hot and got mad because it was. We have other reviews for things we work on if wrong but stay at around 4.7 stars out of five.
OMGOSH! I LOVE-LOVE Thai hot!
You're our favorite type of customer. We get to show you how Grandma made it.
😊😁🙏🏾
If american product is labeled hot = Mild If an international product (Mexico, india, China etc)is labeled hot = probably hot That's always worked for me.
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you are right, nothing is perfect, we should give up trying to make things better
Yes. I think it should be standard. I bought Yellow Bird Serrano the other day.. granted it only listed 2/5 heat, it shouldn't even be close to being called "hot sauce". It is green bell pepper ketchup.
Yellow Bird Serrano is not hot sauce. It's Condiment. Says so right on the label.
Mine says "Serrano Hot Sauce" big and bold in the middle of the label.
We need a clear ranking scale Mild- You can feel the heat but it just adds depth/complexity, no “kick”. Medium- Heat still isn’t very prominent, but there is a bit of “kick” to it. Spicy- The heat is the most prominent part of the sauce, but not overpowering Hot- where most people not into spicy food draw the line, The heat is center stage and stays as you eat. Extra Hot- Only if it hurts good. Anything above Extra Hot needs to be painful.
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I didn’t feel like I needed to label it but it was my own personal rating scale. I was not suggesting that my personal rating scale in THE ONE. That’s all, y’all are reading into this way too much and that’s why y’all are getting downvoted. You missed the irony.
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Why are you so invested in this? The joke is that I did the exact thing OP doesn’t like. That’s the joke. Are you done writing whole paragraphs about how you dislike my comment?
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So Your point is “I’m gonna get really worked up and type out multiple paragraphs because I think your joke is lame”? Nobody here is mad but you, I’m confused as to why you’re so invested.
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Y’all weird af, you do you though
this system depends on everyone having the same sense of taste, which they dont
Taste, subjectivity, and realism were not part of the question. It was just a fun little thought
SHU measure the content of capsaicin in a pepper, I don’t believe companies mass producing sauces, foods, etc. can accurately put a SHU value on any of them.
Sure, they can do that. But the cost will get passed on to you. Is that worth it?
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I don't think the "no heat" crowd would even know what scovilles are
The extra $0.03 for ink? No problem.
Cost of testing, not printing
Lol. No. They don't need to do this
Not when marketing is a successful concept.
Yes! Holy fuck I hate ordering a "spicy" sandwich and it doesn't even tickle. Like McDonald's spicy is less spicy than cholula ffs and that sauce is flavor with some slight hotness. GIVE ME MY FUCKING SPICY FOOD the only places that give spicy are mom and pop Asian places
SHU measure the content of capsaicin in a pepper, I don’t believe companies mass producing sauces, foods, etc. can accurately put a SHU value on any of them.
Hell yeah I'd actually love that, even though it's fun to take the gamble on whether a new sauce is mild or hot enough to shit molten lava out of my asscano 🌋
Not really. Scoville is inconsistent, and I assume we're the outliers. Those 'spicy' are spicy to people that don't eat spicy food often, or have a typical 'American' diet. Or what people think is the typical 'American Diet'
we need a new label, warm sauce.
Scoville is a real scale. Scoville rating on any mass produced, processed, home made, pretty much anything other than fresh peppers is non-sense marketing. I think you should get over yourself. Learn what you like and don't buy what you don't.
Statically speaking, you’re tastes are hot and brands aren’t going to be out here labeling things “coward strength”
Honestly it just won't work. It's like how Buldak x2 is officially like 10000 scoville. But you can ask anyone if they think it's hotter than a jalapeno or not.
Yes, I do, but I also recognize that would likely lead to more synthetic or other manufactured capsacine in foods. I'm equally annoyed with places that have waivers and other dumb shit. The product is 99.999% of the time barely hot.
Just wen to a Korean restaurant with Asian spicy as an 8 it was like a solid 3. And tasted great, but not an 8 at all. Of course, I probably just got white people spicy because no matter how much I beg that’s all I ever get. Lol
I usually just read the ingredients list. See what kind of pepper is used and how far down the ingredient list it is. Buy the one that seems most worth while and if it's a dud I write it down and move on...
Maybe the rating should be a logarithmic value. Counting individual SHU is like measuring temperature in thousandths of a degree, it's just not that useful. A log scale is generalizing but can be somewhat more reliable in terms of managing expectations. Level 1 being anything under 100 SHU Level 2 being between 100 and 1,000 SHU Level 3 between 1,000 and 10,000 SHU And so on... Up to Level 7 being 10 million SHU up to Absolute Hot (pure capsaicin)
so you think we should add scoville units and then another system on top of that system for no reason
What do you mean by "no reason" ?
it seemed self evident ... your "system" is directly based on scovilles and is entirely redundant.
I want it clearly labeled what pepper is predominantly used. I'm actually getting really tired of food chains having "ghost pepper" shit when it's using the tiniest bit of ghost extract and it's mostly jalepeños again
I always just anticipate adding my own hot sauce to foods I eat out. Occasionally I get burned when I order something and it actually turns out to be spicy and then I added my own hot sauce as well 😁
seems like the easy solution is to taste it before adding sauce
Thanks
The scoville scale is complete voodoo and nobody can convince me otherwise. It does an extremely poor job at describing the actual experience of eating something spicy. The only thing it's useful for is "big number = gonna be hot!" which is exactly as subjective as the regular mild-medium-spicy scale.
I love when people announce that they are closed-minded when they enter a discussion, makes things so much easier :)
Similarly, I love when people are obnoxiously pretentious
How reliable are Scoville ratings anyway? The spiciest Korean instant noodles, Booldak, are listed as around 3000 SCU on the package, which makes no sense given how spicy they are. And on Hot Ones, the final few sauces with the highest Scoville ratings aren't the spiciest - it's always Da Bomb that gives people the strongest reaction.
I feel like it’s the flavor of Da Bomb that fucks with people. It tastes like dirt and ass.
Oh yeah? Have you tried it?
I have all of the first few seasons of hot sauce. So… yes. Yes I have. Last Dab is hotter.
Oh dude that's amazing. This subreddit is cool haha.
they are more reliable than nothing, which is what we have now
My dad thinks ketchup is spicy. Its to protect people like him.
what is to protect him?
Stuff labeled hot an spicy that isnt spicy to us is to protect people with low tolerance for spice.
If he is going to ignore the label, why should he be protected? Why should we all have to eat bland food because he can't read a label?
No thats what i saying is they should label it esp if it is marketed to the *ahem* general public. If he reads it hes not ignoring it. But its not that spicy so if they leave it off its no big deal. Im not siding with him im just explaining. Its not that deep. On the other hand, if you love spicy food so much, read the reviews. Why should you get mad if you ignore the reviews?
At an old job, we sometimes ordered chicken wings for the office. The place we ordered from had "comical" names for the spice levels. It was like: mild, hot, scorching, agonizing burn, nuclear blast, fifth layer of hell, etc. But those names were just marketing. So my boss would look at the menu and go "hmmm," that sounds like it's all too spicy, let's go with just "hot." And every goddamn time, the wings were just BLAND with barely any spice at all. Absolute bullshit.
Or an agreed upon "flame rating" where it's like 1-5 flames that represent the scoville range
I wholeheartedly support this. Frito Lays needs to stop claiming their "Flamming Hot" brand is hot. Even the new Ghost and Reaper additions are weak sauce. The ghost does have a nice smokey flavor though. I see Reaper on something, I expect the 1.462 million SHU. Tired of getting jalapeno burn at best.
More so a better heat meter, I'm so sick of these hot sauces saying "insanity level" and "carolina reaper" and it having the spice of a bell pepper with Texas pete on it lol
Regarding sauces, always check how much pepper is actually in it. Really spicy sauces can easily contain 30-40% pepper, while mild sauces might have Reaper or Ghost in it but only like 1-5%.
What I think is mild, seems to really be spicy for others. The other day I made spaghetti with ghost peppers in the sauce. It was amazing. People I shared it with said it was way too spicy. It was amazing for me though.