In Johnny Scoville’s most recent video, he shows off the results of the sauces he sent in for Scoville Heat Unit testing. The results match his previous test of The last Dab: Xperience (60,000 vs a claimed 2.4 – 2.7 million) while comparing it with two other sauces.
My big question is why do sauces have so little spice compared to the peppers they are made from? Even ignoring the Scoville scale, a sauce never matches the heat of a fresh pepper. I know that scoville’s are measured per unit of dry mass, are these sauces measured differently in some way? But some companies show off a SHU rating that is in line with these results like Tabasco’s scorpion sauce at a claimed 33,000 SHU. I’ve seen theories but no proof or real explanations yet as to why this happens or why a sauce could only have 2-5% the rating of the peppers it’s made of.
I’ve spent too much time thinking about this lol but I am really curious about how this works
by FlippedTurtles
2 Comments
I keep having to point this out, but SHU ratings for peppers are based on DRY PEPPERS.
Peppers are around 90% water, so fresh peppers are approximately 1/10th as hot as their SHU ratings.
Sauces made with 90% peppers by volume are therefor going to be, at most, 90% as hot as the fresh peppers.
However, heat breaks capsaicin down, so if the peppers or sauce have been heated to more than 400 F, they aren’t going to be as hot as they could be.
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Also, some sauce ratings are based on the DEHYRATED weight of the sauce.
This is why Da Bomb is so hot despite being “only” 135,000 SHU. Other brands are lying about how hot their sauces are.
A sauce made with a 3,000,000 Scoville pepper can never be hotter than about about 400,000 SCU. I should point out that sauces made with powders and flakes could potentially be much hotter.
According to Currie himself, The Last Dab isn’t intended to be a brutally hot sauce, despite being marketed at one.
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In the case of certain Hot Ones products, they are simply stating the SHU rating of the pepper itself as the SCU rating of the sauce, which is just so wrong as to be fraudulent.
SHU ratings are pointless if you want to apply them to anything else other than capsaicin extract. If you’re concerned with spice ratings, check for the percentage of the “active” ingredient on the product you’re buying.