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heat How does sauce ingredients affect heat level?

Ohjay

Ohjay

Might be a really hard question to answer... but in general, how does sauce ingredients affect heat level and what can you do to balance the heat?
 
The reason I'm asking is I made a hot sauce with watermelon and used habaneros(8) and 7pot bubblegum(3) and the heat level is way, way, way higher than I anticipated.
My previous sauce was based on mango and used only habanero(20) and I could eat that sauce all day without breaking a sweat.
I almost made twice as much of the watermelon sauce compared to the mango sauce, so in theory the watermelon should have been a lot more diluted(in terms of heat)
 
So I'm thinking that the heat level of a sauce is highly dependant on which ingredients you use, not just the peppers.
In my example above, a watermelon, although sweet, is mostly water. While a mango is sweet but has a lot of flesh and thick consistency... which made me think that perhaps the type of ingredient affects the heat level.
 
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The Hot Pepper said:
You probably answered your own question with your own sauces, better then anyone can in words.
Click to expand...
Thanks!
 
But I'm way too much of a sauce-noob to actually know if my assumptions are correct or not, thus the question :)
 
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The only thing that makes it less hot, is less capsaicin. So, as you assumed, in this case, the watermelon is mostly water, which boils off and therefore there is less of it.
 
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Sugar is a big element in the final heat level of sauces and stuff.  The original Scoville testing was based on sugar water dilutions.  Sugar cuts the heat, so if you make a similar recipe of peppers and ingredients but use watermelon in one and mango in the other...the mango one probably won't taste as hot because the sugar in the mango will tone down the heat. 
 
I've found the same thing when making products to sample at festivals.  When mixing Pure Evil with soy sauce and catsup, using the same number of drops in the same amount of catsup or soy sauce, the soy sauce tastes hotter and the catsup is less hot.  I figure it's cuz of the sugar in the catsup.   
 
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This would be a meaningful experiment if you used​ the exact same peppers and weight but differrnt ingredients... but umm use hotter peppers it will be hotter lol.
 
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Whoops  :oops:
I didn't think 7pot bubblegums were that hot... I thought they were in the 1 mil SHU range, not nearly twice that.
Although I don't even know that they are 7pot bubblegums but they have the characteristics of that pepper. They came from an unstable cross last year, but I don't know which plants had been crossed.
 
But as SL mentioned, what I was sort of trying to get confirmation of is that an ingredient(sugar in this case I suppose) can make a sauce less hot. And if you use a fruit that's mostly water you won't have as much sugar as with a fruit that is a lot "fleshier"...
 
But The Boss raises an interesting idea.. make two different sauces with the same amount of peppers, and see how it differs in heat level.
Could be a fun experiment with my reapers  :crazy:
I'll definitely try this out at some point this year.
 
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Sugar certainly (to a point) makes the heat a little more tolerable. Really only while it's in your mouth though, I don't think it makes any difference to the residual burn in your mouth.
 
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