Writer: Mary Jane Miller
So, you make your own hot sauce. Fun! Your friends love it. Great! But do you know how hot it really is? If you want to find out, and have some laughs doing it, turn it into a spicy party game!
In 1912, pharmacist Wilbur Scoville developed the “organoleptic dilution test” to measure how hot a substance containing capsaicin really is. Capsaicin, the oil-soluble compound in chile peppers, gives us that fiery sensation — and its intensity can now be quantified using Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). It’s more than trivia: This scale has real value in commercial food production.
When I was studying to become a food scientist, I worked in the lab at Tone’s Spices, the Ankeny-based company that brothers Jehiel and Isaac Tone founded in 1873 in downtown Des Moines. One of my favorite tasks was taking part in SHU trials. Honestly? I thought it was kind of fun. I’m a “super taster” — I’ve been officially tested. (You can order super taster strips online. That’s a geeky, science-y party game all by itself.) During those tests, I took pride in being able to detect heat in increasingly diluted samples.
How to set it up
Dilution 1: 1 teaspoon hot sauce in 3 tablespoons of water = 10 SHU
Dilution 2: 1 teaspoon of Dilution 1 in 3 tablespoons of water = 100 SHU
Dilution 3: 1 teaspoon of Dilution 2 in 3 tablespoons of water = 1,000 SHU
Dilution 4: 1 teaspoon of Dilution 3 in 3 tablespoons of water = 10,000 SHU
Palate cleansers
Since capsaicin isn’t water-soluble, a sip of water won’t do much to cleanse the palate. Instead, offer a sip of milk or a bite of bread between rounds to reset their taste buds. Beer or wine can work, too — and make the whole thing feel more like a party.
How to play
Set out the labeled dilutions with your palate cleansers. Have your panel of five or six tasters start with the most concentrated dilution (No. 1) and work their way through each sample. At each stage, ask if they can still taste the heat.
When only one or two people in the group can still detect the heat, that’s your stopping point. The number of the last dilution where the heat was noticeably detected gives you an approximate Scoville rating for your hot sauce.
We did this with friends recently and scored Tabasco at 4,000 SHU. Tabasco’s website states it is between 2,500 and 5,000, so I think we did pretty well.
You can set it up using your own hot sauce the same way. If yours is hotter than Tabasco, just keep doubling the water for each subsequent test. It’s not quite how the actual Scoville test works in the lab, but it’s still a fun activity to do with your pepper-loving friends.
