SPICE, SPICE, BABY
I ate world’s hottest chilli ‘Pepper X’ that’s 340x spicier than a jalapeno… I spent 3hrs on the floor writhing in pain
A CHILLI fanatic was left writhing in agony for three hours after scoffing the world's hottest pepper - which he said is like eating napalm.
Pepper breeder Ed Currie is the creator of Pepper X, which is twice as hot as his previous record holder the Carolina Reaper, and 340 times hotter than a jalapeno.
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Ed, one of five brave souls to have eaten the chilli, said that the sensation of eating a Pepper X can only be compared to experiencing a napalm-esque burn.
He said: “I was feeling the heat for three-and-a-half hours. Those cramps are horrible.
“I was laid out flat on a marble wall for approximately an hour in the rain, groaning in pain.”
Pepper X has been carefully curated by Ed over the last decade.
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To create a chilli of nuclear capabilities, Ed had to experiment with cross-breeding a variety of his hottest chillies.
He said: “If we get desirable traits, like high indices of capsaicinoids we’re looking for, then we’ll keep on going on the cross.
"If it doesn’t work, then we gotta start all over again, and it’s a very time-consuming, very long process."
He described his creation as a laborious mixture of covering genetics, chemistry and botany.
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In understanding all of the above, he eventually crossbred a Carolina Reaper with a "brutally hot" mystery species that was sent to him from a friend in Michigan.
According to Ed: “Pepper X is three times hotter than any other peppers that are out there available commercially. It’s twice as hot as the Reaper at 1.6 million, so this is a dangerous pepper.”
The heat of chillies are measured in Scoville heat units (SHU) - a scale based on the concentration of capsaicin.
Capsaicin is the active component of chilli peppers, it's what causes the burning sensation when it makes contact with human tissue.
The scale starts at zero, for bland, while a jalapeno pepper is generally around 5,000 units.
Habanero, the record-holder two decades ago, registered a mean of 100,000 SHU.
Pepper X has been averaging at an eye-watering 2.7 million SHU, with some reports even putting it at 3.8 million.
But this recent success is hardly the end of Ed's all consuming, fiery passion to create a chilli capable of mass destruction.
Ed has already started work engineering chillies far hotter than his latest beast, asserting that Pepper X is not the pinnacle.
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