scoville units

15 years ago

Hey everyone, just found this website and I love it. anyways I have been trying to figure out what I am not getting about scoville units. they say that 1 drop of "pepper" in 1,000,000 drops of water is 1.5 scoville. so a pepper with a scoville of 300,000 would be detectable in 2,710,000 gal of water. could this be correct? I have a hard time beleiving that I could detect one drop of "pepper" in 5 gal of water. any info whould be great. thanks!

Comment (1)

datilman007
15 years ago
A drop of water is considered by most to be 50 microliters, which is the same as saying "50 millionths of a liter".

Compared to one liter, a drop is equal to .000050 of that liter. So, if you wanted to have 1 million drops of water, it would be exactly 13.20860255 gallons, not just 5.

Evidently, there are people who can sense the "heat" of capsicum in a pepper at one drop per 13 gallons of water.

After experiencing the heat of a Bhut Jolokia pepper, I can believe that it can be done. The sensation of heat from a Bhut Jolokia is so intense that it is in a class of it's own.

The validity and accuracy of the Scoville Organoleptic test have been widely criticised. The American Spice Trade Association and the International Organisation for Standardisation have adopted a modified version. The American Society for Testing and Materials is considering other organoleptic tests (the Gillett method) and a number of other chemical tests to assay for capsaicinoids involved in pungency. Even so, the values obtained by these various tests are often related back to Scoville Units. Nowadays the High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) test is used. In this procedure, chile pods are dried, then ground. Next, the chemicals responsible for the pungency are extracted, and the extract is injected into the HPLC for analysis. This method is more costly than the previous, but it allows an objective heat analysis. Not only does this method measure the total heat present, but it also allows the amounts of the individual capsaicinoids to be determined. In addition, many samples may be analyzed within a short period.

A quick conversion from HPLC to Scoville is to multiply the ppm by 15 to get the Scoville Heat Unit.
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scoville units

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datilman007

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