The chart is just a start, but if you’re feeling like a little bit of a kick with your food, you’ll get an idea of just how hot some common sauces are, thanks to Sriracha2Go. Sriracha, in case you’ve missed out, is a spicy sauce that’s been known to folks out west for decades but only started becoming a national frenzy about five years ago. It’s sometimes called “Rooster Sauce” because of the rooster on the bottle of the most popular brand, Huy Fong Sriracha.
The Scoville scale is an objective measure of hotness that measures the amount of capsaicin in something. Capsaicin, apparently, is the thing that gives peppers its, well, pepperiness.
Most regular folks can take some level of hot sauce up to about 5,000 Scoville units, but the pursuit of the perfect hot doesn’t stop there. Various specialty foods are out there with absurd Scoville ratings. One of the favorites of the blog staff is “Da Bomb Beyond Insanity” rated at 135,000 Scoville units:
“Da Bomb” requires no refrigeration since nothing could actually live in it, and the blog staff report that even they can’t take more than about five drops in a large bowl of chili. It’s worth pointing out that an excessive amount of capsaicin in your system can actually kill you, so before you go out trying to beat the bloggers at their own game, BE CAREFUL and start small.
For reference, your average pepper spray, the sort of thing you use to ward off attackers, starts at 500,000 Scovile units. So this stuff really is, hot hot hot. And, just because it’s Fun Friday, here’s one more thing that’s “hot hot hot” for you OG’s out there:
