Saga Jolokia - Searching for the new "World's Hottest Chile"
By Harald Zoschke, with input from Dr. Paul Bosland and Dave DeWitt
Posted November 17, 2006
It's been more than five years that an Indian "Mystery Chile" was making headlines, and claims for such a "new" variety were published in print, and all over the Internet. With almost one million Scoville Units, it was supposed to be several times hotter than the Red Savina™, the current holder of that title in the Guinness World Records. Time and again the hot pod popped up in the news, yet no one in the Western world had seen it. That has changed recently, as new claims for such a potent pepper came from the UK, and also from the renowned Chile Pepper Institute of the New Mexico State University.
First Sightings
In September 2000, we got hold of a newspaper clipping from the International Herald Tribune. Headlined "Assam Chile named Hottest in the World", AP had a brief story about a chile pepper variety grown in the northeastern hills of Assam, India. With 855,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), it would outperform the Red Savina's much-quoted (and never duplicated) heat level of 577,000 SHU. The source given for that newsbyte was S.C. Dass, deputy director of the Defense Research Laboratory in the Assamese town of Tezpur.
At that time, the ‘Naga Jolokia’, also named the ‘Tezpur’ in some reports, was said to be a member of Capsicum frutescens, the same species as the ‘Tabasco’ chile, while the blistering hot ‘Red Savina’ is a Capsicum chinense. And this statement from the Indian researchers alerted Frank Garcia of GNS Spices, the Californian developer and grower of the ‘Red Savina’, listed so far as the world's hottest pepper in the Guinness World Records. Regular red and orange habaneros are typically in the 150,000 to 300,000 ballpark.
"It would be highly unusual for a frutescens to be that hot," Garcia said in an interview with fiery-foods.com. With some Savina record challengers, Garcia also questioned the reliability of the test results: "In some cases labs have discovered that the challengers’ samples have been adulterated with oleoresin," the extremely hot capsaicin extract, thus disqualifying them. "But anything’s possible," he said of the ‘Naga Jolokia’, "so, bring it on and let’s get some American laboratories to test samples of both the Indian chile and the ‘Red Savina’ and see which is the hottest."
Response by the Chile Pepper Institute and by Dave DeWitt
As Dave noted back then, the report was interesting for the lack of detail of the methodology used to calculate Scoville Units through HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography). He asked Dr. Paul Bosland, the noted chile breeder at New Mexico State University to read the report in "Current Science" and to give us an opinion. Dr. Bosland pointed out that while the HPLC should be calibrated first by using a known concentration of capsaicin solution, there was no mention of such a procedure. This alone could account for measuring 100,000 SHU too much. He also questioned the preparation of the chiles -- did they weigh the chile sample before extracting? Were the seeds, pericarp, and placenta ground together, or did they just pick the hot parts?
In light of Dr. Bosland’s skepticism, Dave repeated his challenge to the Indian scientists, Ritesh Mathur, R.S. Dangi. S.C. Dass, and R.C. Malhotra of the Defence Research Laboratory in Gwalior, India, to send him samples of the ‘Tezpur’ pods for testing by two U.S. labs -- the one at New Mexico State University, and one at Analytical Food Laboratories. Frank Garcia agreed to provide his samples for a "hottest chile test-off." Dave also emailed this challenge to the Indian scientists -- in vain, though.
It should be mentioned that to date, there seems to be no evidence that anyone ever came close to duplicating the 577,000 SHU result published by Garcia for his Red Savina. In fact, typical heat results for Red Savina are more in the 250,000 SHU range - see also Heat Levels Reported as well as The The Australian Chile Test. In fact, Red Savina's heat is often topped by Chocolate Habanero, and we haven't even tested the blistering hot Central African Fatalii yet...
Over the past years, several chile varieties surfaced and claimed to be the famous ‘Naga Jolokia’, or ‘Tezpur’ pepper, including Indian PC-1 . This slim red pepper, a member of the Capsicum frutescens species, tasted more like Cayenne, and similar to it, the pepper scored only five-digit Scoville results. No wonder we suspected rather soon that this kind of pepper was no challenge to Frank Garcia's Red Savina, belonging to Capsicum chinense, just like Habanero and other six-digit heat Scoville power-packs.
A first clue that the infamous ‘Naga Jolokia’ had to be a chinense member, too, came in 2003. For a special issue on international chile peppers that Dave contributed to, the Japanese magazine, Paper Sky, sent a reporter all the way to Tezpur, to check out the claim about this pepper. The reporter, Graham Simmons, soon discovered that the chile was named after the ferocious Naga warriors, who once inhabited Nagaland in Assam, one of India’s most fertile regions. Accompanying the article was a photo of a rather dried out plant that still had some orange-red pods on it. The pods were clearly Capsicum chinense, the species containing the habaneros. So at least the species mystery was solved -- but what about that HPLC test? Unfortunately, Simmons did not speak directly to the Indian scientists, and even if he did, it would be too much to hope that he quizzed them about their testing methodology.
More proof that Naga Jolokia was most likely a chinense chile came from a 2004 fiery-foods.com reader. He reported that they had a lot of curry houses in Japan, and they would make some extremely spicy dishes, many with Indian Tezpur. Some of these restaurants even have jars of whole Indian Tezpurs sitting on shelves, he went on, looking much like a Caribbean Habanero, just a little bigger.
I don't feel it's worth the associated aftermath on your digestive system.
