FORT MILL, South Carolina — How hot is Ed Currie’s world-record-holding chili pepper?
It’s so hot that when you walk into the chili sorting room at his company, your eyes burn and your throat tightens from the sizzling fumes of hundreds of peppers.
It’s so hot that workers who peel the chilies and scrape out seeds must wear two pairs of gloves because the chili oils can tear through one pair in just 15 minutes.
The pepper — Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper — is the world’s hottest chili pepper, according to Guinness World Records.
How Hot Is It? Don't Ask
The Carolina Reaper rates a searing 1.56 million Scoville heat units (SHUs), hotter than the previous record holder — the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T from Australia, at 1.46 million SHUs. A very hot jalapeno might reach 10,000 SHUs.
Chili heat rankings may seem trivial, but they are a burning issue for people who sell hot sauce, salsa and other spicy things.
After Guinness named the Reaper the world’s hottest pepper one year ago, sales at PuckerButt, Currie’s company, soared. Sales are eight times higher than they were last year, Currie said.
To celebrate the anniversary, Currie recently munched on a plump Carolina Reaper, one of eight to 10 “weapon-quality” peppers he said he eats whole every day.
“Agh ... I’m ... losing ... the ... ability ... to ... talk,” Currie said, gasping.
His throat was on fire. His face was blood red. His eyes watered. He choked down the rest of the Reaper and gulped down cold carbonated water. “Eating them whole like that is just stupid,” he said.
After several minutes of gasping, choking and stomach cramps, Currie reported that “it still hurts.”
Salsa, Hot Sauce, Chili Seeds
Currie, 51, first became fascinated with crossbreeding plants when he was a boy in Michigan. He read library books about plants and read horticulture magazines ordered by his mother, a master gardener.
He began crossbreeding peppers after reading scientific papers suggesting that their chemical compounds might reduce the risk of heart attacks and cancer, two diseases that run in his family, Currie said.
“I wanted to find out how not to die,” he said. “I wanted to keep on partying.”
In 2001, Currie moved to South Carolina and began working at a bank. At home, he made salsas and hot sauces from peppers he grew in his yard.
The peppers helped him woo and wed his wife, who loves salsa. She helped convince him later to sell his salsas rather than giving them away to friends and neighbors.
Currie opened a small booth at a flea market. Two years ago, he opened a storefront location on Main Street in downtown Fort Mill. He quit his bank job to dedicate himself full-time to his company.
Today, the 8-year-old company sells salsa, hot sauce, chili seeds, chili jellies, chocolates, peanut brittle and brownies to customers worldwide.
Scaling The Pepper Peak
It took Currie 12 years of crossbreeding to reach the peak of the pepper world. He said he tested hundreds of hybrid combinations before finally finding the perfect combination. In the end, he combined a “really nastily hot” La Soufriere pepper from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and a Naga pepper from Pakistan to create Smokin' Ed’s Carolina Reaper — called “a tidal wave of scorching fire” on the company’s website.
In his fourth year of the breeding the Reaper — it takes years for hybrids to reproduce and stabilize — Currie asked a friend to taste the new hybrid. “He took a bite and fell to his knees and threw up, so I knew I had something,” Currie said.
Stomping through one of his pepper fields outside Fort Mill, Currie carries on a nonstop conversation about each hybrid planted among long rows of peppers. He discusses sun, soil, nutrients and taste.
The peppers are curvy and alluring: orange, red and green spheres glowing in the late autumn sunshine. Currie stops and caresses several plants.
Currie is an independent person who insists on doing things his own way, and it took him more than two years to fill out the Guinness paperwork. “I don’t follow directions well,” he said.
Finally, Currie submitted 15 pages of scientific documentation, based on years of testing by chemists at Winthrop University in South Carolina. Their official rating of the Reaper — 1.56 million Scoville heat units — was accepted by Guinness. The Scoville scale is named after the American chemist Wilbur Scoville, who invented a procedure to test pepper heat in 1912.
Reaper Is Aptly Named
One scientist’s opinion of the Reaper? “Too darn hot for me to taste,” said Cliff Calloway, a chemistry professor at Winthrop who tested the Reaper for more than five years using gas chromatography. In fact, he said, just the Reaper fumes and residue on his lab gloves were too hot for him.
The Reaper is the hottest pepper he has ever tested, Calloway said. The human body responds to the chemical “heat” from the Reaper as if it were burned with a match, he added.
Currie explained that capsaicinoid compounds in peppers attach to taste receptors in the tongue.
“It tricks the body into thinking it’s being burned,” he said. “Your body signals that as heat.”
Currie grows more than 15,000 chili pepper plants at 30 sites in North and South Carolina, plus sites in four other states, and at his home. He keeps plot locations secret, fearing competitors will sneak in and steal his peppers.
Should anyone else bring out a pepper hotter than the Reaper, Currie is ready. He has eight other hybrids that are hotter than the Reaper, he said. The hottest averages 2.83 million SHUs in scientific lab testing, he said, far higher than the Reaper’s 1.56-million rating.
This One's Top Secret (For Now)
The hottest pepper — its name is top secret — “tastes awful,” Currie said. “It has a few seconds of flavor, and then the heat builds and builds and just doesn’t let up.”
Forty minutes after chewing one, he was still drinking water, he said. He woke up hours later at 2 a.m. "with an awful gut ball" — terrible stomach cramps.
Currie said he's tasted the new hybrid more than 50 times.
Why?
“I’m stupid,” he said.
