Is a hot sauce as hot as the pepper in it?

Pepper X, which the shop that sells it puts at 2,693,000 Scoville units, a Guinness World Record, goes into five bottles on Hot Ones’ own store. The Last Dab: Xperience is rated 11 out of 10 for heat. Nugget Honey is rated 4.

The reason is printed on the back of each. Xperience lists Pepper X first, then vinegar, then Pepper X again as a powder and as a distillate. Nugget Honey lists honey, then gin, then Pepper X.

A pepper’s number tells you how hot the pepper is, and most people meet it on a bottle, where it reads as the bottle’s. I read every bottle on the shelf where hot sauce is watched most, to see what each says about its own heat.

Out of ten.

Hot Ones is the YouTube interview show whose guests face ten chicken wings in ten sauces, each hotter than the last. Its own store sells 47 sauces in single bottles: 16 of the show’s own, and 31 from 30 other makers.

Every one carries a heat out of 10, from 1 to 11, and every one prints its ingredients. Not one of the 47 pages gives the sauce a Scoville number.

Eight give one for the pepper inside, and one says what happens next: “Pepper X recently clocked in at 2,693,000 Scovilles, but this hot sauce recipe tones things down slightly”.

Heatonist, the New York shop that helps choose the show’s line-up, says why in its guide to the scale: “lab testing is usually limited to chilis going for the record, and not to hot sauces”. For most of its sauces it uses “a 1-10 scale”.

The makers’ own stores say no more. Of the 31 bottles from other makers, 17 have a page on their maker’s own store, and none gives the sauce a Scoville number. They give their own scales instead: 11 out of 10, 3.5 out of 10, six flames out of six, “Medium +”.

Two scales of ten don’t always agree on the same bottle. Dawson’s rates its Coffee Date 3.5 out of 10; the show rates it 1. TorchBearer rates its Sucker Punch 11; the show, 9.

Two numbers on the shelf.

Heatonist does print Scoville estimates for the line-up, on its pages for the season ten-packs. On the pages for the last two seasons, one sauce in each has one.

Los Calientes Rojo, the fifth wing of the current season, is put at 49,000. Its hottest pepper, an orange habanero, is the tenth of its nineteen ingredients.

Pickled Garlic Sriracha, from the season before, is put at 18,000. Its only pepper is the jalapeño, which the same shop’s guide puts at 2,500 to 8,000.

A sauce can’t be hotter than the only pepper in it, and this estimate is more than twice the hottest jalapeño on the shop’s own list.

Tabasco, which prints a Scoville range for its pepper sauces on its own pages, puts its green jalapeño sauce at 600 to 1,200.

Counted dry.

The number on a pepper begins with the pepper dried. Wilbur Scoville’s test of 1912 dissolved a weighed amount of dried pepper in alcohol, then diluted it in sugar water until most of a panel of five tasters could no longer feel the heat.

Labs now measure the burning molecules themselves, capsaicin and its kin, and the trade still counts them in a million parts of dried pepper. A pepper’s range on a chart is a count of that kind.

A fresh pepper is about nine parts in ten water, which the pepper’s number leaves out. In the bottle the water stays, and the vinegar, the fruit and everything else take their share as well.

That is why Tabasco’s numbers fall so far. Its scorpion sauce lists the scorpion pepper first and puts itself at 23,000 to 33,000, against a pepper Heatonist’s guide puts at 1.2 to 2 million: about 2 per cent, taking the middle of each range.

Its habanero sauce, the pepper second after vinegar, says over 7,000, beside a habanero of 100,000 to 577,000.

A pepper’s number counts the pepper dried. The bottle is mostly water.

The back of the bottle.

The one clue to a bottle’s heat printed on the bottle itself is its list of ingredients. In the United States, the law has it run from the heaviest to the lightest.

On Hot Ones’ shelf, 13 sauces list their hottest pepper first, and the middle one of them is rated 9 out of 10. Sixteen list it fifth or later, and their middle sits between 4 and 5, whatever the pepper.

The Carolina Reaper runs from 4, sixth of nine ingredients in a white mustard sauce, to 10, first in The Last Dab: Reaper Edition.

The list gives the order, never the amounts, and five of the 47 lists name no pepper at all, only words like “chili peppers” or “hot peppers”.

A number of its own.

An honest number for a bottle comes from testing the bottle, not the pepper. Even then Tabasco calls its numbers “an approximation”, and a pepper’s heat changes from plant to plant and harvest to harvest, which is why every chart gives a range.

Without a test, the honest thing a label can say is the pepper’s number, marked as the pepper’s. On Straight Face, the five sauces I made, each card names its pepper’s heat and claims none of it for the bottle.

Seen while makingStraight Face