i thought heat took out the heat of peppers

Probably because the oil, Capsium, is concentrated from the drying process, thus more capsium per tsp.

It's a ridiculous claim or at best extremely misleading. It implies that I can take a very mild variety and by drying it make it as hot as a habanero or something. The total Scoville units in that pepper when dried will never be more that the original amt, and actually less.

I ran this question by some friends of mine that would know for sure thinking that I might be missing something in the statement.

jt

Let me give you my interpretation...

The Scoville scale is based on dilution - dilute a given amount of the pepper with sugar water until the heat disappears. For instance, a Caribbean Red that has has 300,000 SU's must be diluted by 300,000 times for the heat to disappear. That means 1 gm of pureed CR added to 300,000 gms of sugar water and finally you don't detect heat.

A much more accurate means is high pressure liquid chromatography where one actually measures the concentration of the capsaicin compounds.

Both methods are based on the pepper "as is" and in this state the pepper has quite a good bit of water - I guessing about 80%.

So, if you base your analytical technique on dry basis vs. wet basis, naturally the results are going to be different.

For instance, take a Naga Morich rated at 1,000,000 scoville units. That's wet basis. If it's roughly 80% moisture and 20% solids, then the pepper would have 1,000,000 divided by 0.2 SU's or about 5,000,000 SU's dry basis.

Pure capsaicin is about 16,000,000 SU's dry basis.

Incidentally, the Naga Morich rated at 1,000,000 SU's is roughly 6.25% capsaicin wet basis. On a dry basis and assuming 80% moisture, that would be 31.25% capsaicin. Either way, that is huge!

BTW - I am assuming no chemical reactions taking place during the drying process that may reduce the capsaicin content of the original pepper.