How Smokin’ Ed Currie Created the World’s Hottest Peppers

The person who developed the “hottest pepper within the (recognized) world” is the legendary farmer and pepper-sauce producer and self-taught plant geneticist Ed “Smokin’ Ed” Currie of Fort Mill, South Carolina. 

His world-beating pepper, the cultivar “Pepper X,” was named the spiciest by the Guinness Ebook of World Information, thought of by pepper- and chile-heads to be the definitive authority of the globe’s hottest pepper, in August 2023.

It made world headlines.  

Briefly to the stats, then: Pepper X clocks in at a staggering 2.69 million Scoville Warmth Models, or SHUs, that are the metric for the ability of the capsaicinoids inside peppers. Capsaicin is the organic compound within the fruit that prompts the ache sensors on our palates and in our our bodies, creating the “burn,” so to talk. 

The burn is a central bulwark of a pepper’s taste and recognition amongst pepperheads, though, as a complete, the flavour of particular person peppers is a posh matrix of different components and compounds native to the fruit along with the burn. In a phrase, Scoville models don’t measure style. They’re a metric of the pepper’s motion on the ache sensors alone. Jalapeños style totally different from habañeros, nevertheless it’s not simply because habañeros are “hotter.”    

For comparability, an odd non-craft jalapeño that we’d choose up out of the bin on the grocery store carries an higher vary of 6000-8000 SHUs, thought of child meals by true pepperheads. One cayenne clocks in at a median of fifty,000 SHUs, or some 54 occasions much less sizzling than Pepper X. A garden-variety habañero will weigh in at 100,000 Scoville models, give or take, or about 27 occasions much less sizzling than Pepper X. In opposition to Pepper X, each pepper in your grocery retailer is gentle work.  

Final August, Pepper X dethroned from the Guinness pedestal a pepper known as the Carolina Reaper, which had held the report since 2013 with its then-world-beating 1.64 million SHUs. Pepper X trounced the Carolina Reaper by a margin of 1.05 million Scoville models. In different phrases, Currie’s gargantuan profitable margin of 1.05 million Scoville models beats the chile world’s definition of a stand-alone “super-hot” pepper, outlined as any pepper bearing over 1 million models. Pepper growers refine their hybrid cultivars for years to exceed that 1 million bar.  Smokin’ Ed’s Pepper X dwarfed the worldwide commonplace.  

The second cause that Pepper X surprised the aficionadi final October is that the dethroned Carolina Reaper was additionally an Ed Currie cultivar. This reality solely buttressed Currie’s legend because the very baddest of the autodidact-geneticist-farmers, gunslinging with peppers for the Guinness report. Earlier than Currie, no different cultivator had ever had a pepper to carry the Guinness report for a decade after which topple that with a cultivar registering over 1,000,000 Scoville models past it. It was the pepperhead equal of Michael Jordan’s run throughout his Chicago Bulls years. 

“The Carolina Reaper is the place it began,” explains the celebrated Currie in an interview with this correspondent for Meals & Wine. “But it surely actually began earlier than that, within the years earlier than we had a farm, after we have been rising peppers in our neighbors’ backyards and making sizzling sauces and promoting seeds. This was about 2002 to 2003. We had this banker buddy we took a few of our sizzling sauce to and he or she introduced us a yellow Scotch bonnet from St. Vincent, within the US Virgin Islands. So I ate it, appreciated it, saved the seeds, and cross-bred them with 9 different peppers, Nagras, Scorpions — something throughout the chinense species. A type of crops’ fruit was particularly ugly — massive fats physique, and an extended tail. Yr-to-year it saved turning out peppers that appeared and tasted precisely the identical.”  

As in artwork, in pepper cultivation, the definition of “ugly” can range broadly. But it surely’s typically true that misshapen, garish, or an aggressively-shaped progress sample will point out the presence of excessive numbers of Scoville models within the peppers. Hybrid cultivars are delicate starters and sizzling peppers are notoriously fickle in not having the ability to preserve taste or warmth profiles from era to era. Cross-breeding for sure traits akin to Scoville models may be likened to the farmers being trapped in an unlimited twister of DNA, grabbing as exactly as they’ll within the hundred-mile-an-hour winds at totally different strands of DNA whipping by in sure crops, hoping that that trait or these traits may be made regular in a sequence of life. It’s what pepper farmers imply after they say a cultivar should be “stabilized.”  

Currie’s level is that the Carolina Reaper was not like that, being remarkably secure from the get-go. “I give it some thought now like an act of nature,” he says. “It was simply the way in which Nature selected to work with that one. Alongside about 2009 to 2010 we invited some pals over to style it.” 

By this Currie means consuming the pepper uncooked.  

“They ate it, cherished it, and each certainly one of them fell down on the ground and vomited,” Currie says proudly. “And the crops simply saved turning out that means. That’s after we knew we had one thing particular.” 

It must be added that the aficionadi of nice quantities of burn have a optimistic relationship with high-Scoville unit peppers’ wonderful powers as an emetic. To them, turning into immediately nauseated as your physique instinctively recoils from the ache ranges triggered by the sheer quantity and energy of the capsaicin working its magic down via the digestive tract is a wonderful factor — a sporting aspect of the chase for the burn. The method of consuming a uncooked Carolina Reaper (or any pepper) does finally launch endorphins, which is how the illuminating excessive that pepperheads so love will get made.     

It took a decade for the Reaper to get from its first hybrid generations to its 2013 Guinness triumph, and it sat atop the world for a decade after that. Smokin’ Ed’s the king the modern-day Gregor Mendel/Johnny Appleseed of chiles as a result of he did that, then he repeated the method with Pepper X.  

And that’s additionally why Currie has such a fats purple goal painted on his again, metaphorically talking. Each pepper cultivator price his salt on at the very least three continents is gunning for him now. Guinness, itself, being an Anglo-Irish product, the pepper growers who vie for the report are primarily from the States, the UK, and Australia.  

People may be forgiven for not realizing the worldwide attain and epic cut-throat parameters of the race for the Guinness report. We now have beneficiant pepper-growing seasons within the South and West and plenty of effective craft sizzling sauces in our markets, to say nothing of these from Mexico or the Caribbean. However the race for the Guinness report is totally different, described by one Australian meals journalist as: “a vastly controversial struggle — there are scandals, accusations of dishonest, demise threats.” 

Which isn’t to recommend that Smokin’ Ed has had any demise threats since his reign started in 2013, nor are we suggesting that any of the previous Guinness winners have engaged in any however essentially the most sporting techniques in creating their peppers. Currie is extremely conscious that he’s Goal No. 1, worldwide. After the Reaper made the Guinness report, Currie advised a digicam workforce that got here down to go to him that “anyone else getting good is simply going to make me higher.”

In 2003 down in Fort Mill, a small city in what South Carolinians name the Piedmont, the hill nation simply south of Charlotte, North Carolina, Currie based his PuckerButt Pepper Firm – so known as as a result of the person is heartily forthright in regards to the varied bodily responses to a few of his merchandise.  His sauces and crops are fashionable. Over the twenty-one years he’s been within the recreation, he’s elevated his acreage to the purpose that he’s delivery greater than a half-million crops of all varieties yearly, in addition to promoting seeds and sizzling sauces made in various strengths from totally different peppers, together with the notoriously named “Final Dab” sauce produced from the Carolina Reaper, and now, a spread of Pepper X merchandise. 

For many who stay shy of his culinary derring-do, it’s reassuring to know you could store at PuckerButt based on the depth of the sauce (as graded by the corporate) and that there are deliberately relaxed sauces and merchandise for many who can’t stand the warmth. Now, after all, the most popular PuckerButt sauces are the handful from Pepper X, together with an American chimichurri and a so-called “Gator” sauce that, due to its muscular concentrations of Pepper X, packs a hefty chunk. However extra entertaining to Currie now’s the method of making sauces and merchandise flavored with tiny quantities of the Reaper or Pepper X which might be extra mass-market.  

“You’ll be able to actually style the flavors, the floral notes down in these peppers if you use them on this means. That’s what I’m going for now within the bigger market,” says the farmer.  

To reassure the pepperheads amongst us, that doesn’t imply that Smokin’ Ed is in any means getting softer or turning into a neater goal. Not one to relaxation on his laurels, he’s at work now on a top-secret, super-hot selection culled and coaxed from his non-public library of seeds that he retains in Fort Mill.