I make my own Sichuan chile oil, collect dried peppers and unlabeled hot sauces from all over the world, and generally appreciate a heavy dose of spice in my life.Īnd so, on Sunday, March 30, shortly after 4 p.m., seven other hopefuls and I stood next to a stage, awaiting our moments of glory. When the organizer, Steve Seabury, asked if he should sign me up for the ' Smoking Ed's Carolina Reaper Pepper Guinness Book of Records Eating Challenge'-in which contestants would vie to set the speed record for eating three Reapers-I really had no choice but to say yes. I'd previously helped judge the Expo's Screaming Mi Mi Awards, in which we blind-tasted many hot sauces to figure out which was the best. Why, you might ask, would anyone want to eat even one Carolina Reaper, which scored 1,569,300 on the Scoville heat-measuring scale? (A habanero, by contrast, rates between 100,000 and 350,000 Scoville units.) Well, I had a good excuse: I was at the Second Annual NYC Hot Sauce Expo, a gathering of 45 vendors from all over the country that drew thousands of attendees to sample hot sauces from companies with names like Defcon, Dragon's Blood Elixir, and PuckerButt (whose owner developed the Reaper). And it took me approximately 14 hours to recover from the aftermath. It took me 21.85 seconds to consume three Carolina Reapers, the world's hottest chiles.

Pepper scoville scale carolina reaper