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I am making a sauce that has:-

3 Ghost peppers,
1 Cherry Bomb pepper,
1 Jalapeño pepper,
1 Habanero pepper,
1 Lady Finger pepper.

It also has Tabasco sauce and Cayenne pepper.

My friends want to know what the Scoville level might be.

Tetsujin
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Hot in the Kitchen
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2 Answers2

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This can be a party activity for your friends. The Scoville test is a dilution test, so you can reproduce it at home at least as far as informing your friends is concerned.

  1. Get a lot of distilled water and a bunch of milk and plain bread.
  2. Create dilutions of the hot sauce by adding 1ml of hot sauce to each of 250ml, 500ml, 1000ml, 2l, 5l, and 10l of distilled water.
  3. Have each of three friends blind taste test the diluted sauce against a glass of plain distilled water, starting with the most diluted.
  4. Cleanse palates between rounds with bread & milk.

The dilution at which the hot sauce's heat cannot be tasted by any of your friends reliably is its approximate Scoville rating. Yes, it's not quite how the actual Scoville test works in the lab, but even if you don't get a rating out of it, it'll be a fun thing for your pepper-loving friends to do on a Sunday afternoon.

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FuzzyChef
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    Let's hope there's no oil in the sauce:P A friend of mine makes [proper commercial, trend & lifestyle market stuff] chilli oil, which by that method would come out as 'zero' or 'omg' depending on whether you got the single oil drop in your mouthful of the 10l. [I'm aware that doesn't make my answer any better, of course ;) – Tetsujin Aug 23 '19 at 17:06
  • Yeah, there's all kinds of ways that this is a limited approach. As far as I know, though, there's no labs that do scoville testing for hire. – FuzzyChef Aug 23 '19 at 20:47
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I doubt anyone can say with any real accuracy & without a test lab.

For a guess, with no real reason to believe it will be accurate…

Take the values of each multiplied by the number of 'elements' & divide that figure by the total elements. Then divide again for any 'thinners', water, oil etc.
For the Tabasco & cayenne you'll have to work out what constitutes 'one element', as scoville is not concerned with quantity, per se.

Tetsujin
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