Breeding the World’s Hottest Pepper

- [Excited Man] Carolina Reaper! - [Camera Man] Go ahead and put it in your mouth. - Go! - [Narrator] Since the first time it was announced to the public that we were growing these, there were literally thousands of YouTube videos of people eating Carolina Reapers all over the world. I get a kick out of most of them. - I made a huge mistake! - Though it can be unpleasant, it's not a dangerous thing to eat super hot peppers. - Oh my God! It's only getting worse! (coughing) - [Narrator] It's a chemical reaction your brain perceives as heat so you will stop doing it. - I'm gonna lay down. This sucks. (uptempo modern classical music) - I'm “Smokin’” Ed Currie. I created the Carolina Reaper. I got into breeding peppers in college and just really was interested in getting hotter and hotter peppers once I tried them. Guinness awarded me the world record for the hottest pepper in November of 2013. To breed these things, I crossed a ghost pepper with a habanero, and what came out was this evil looking pepper that had warts all over it, blisters they call them. And the first time I tasted it, it knocked me to my knees. (uptempo flamenco guitar) We get our peppers tested regularly at Winthrop University by doctor Calloway in the chemistry lab. All peppers are measured by Scoville heat units, which tell you how hot the pepper is. Bell peppers have zero Scoville heat units. Jalapeño is about 5,000, a Serrano 20,000, red habaneros 200,000, ghost peppers 600,000, then you get to the Carolina Reaper, which is 1,569,000 heat units, the hottest thing in the world. (playful string music) When you eat the Carolina Reaper, the first sensation you get is sweet, and then all of a sudden the heat starts going, it's like burning, burning, burning! Then the physiological stuff starts. Your eyes will bloodshot, they just start tearing up and watering, the skin flushes, you start breathing hard, your metabolism starts raising up. Some people say it's like eating molten lava. Others will say it's like licking the sun. To me, it's like eating a charcoal briquette and no matter what you do you cannot get that burn out of the back of your mouth. I mean it's crazy. A lot of what I do is creative expression. You look for traits in one pepper, and you look for traits in another and you try to combine them and keep both those traits. There are other breeders who are trying to break our record, but, uh, we've been holding unreleased peppers in our back pocket that are twice as hot or more than the Carolina Reaper that we could submit to Guinness at any time. My perception of what the limits are of how hot you can breed a pepper has changed as the science has progressed over the years. Just tell me something can't be done, I'm gonna figure out a way to do it.

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 10,879,786

Keywords: great big story, gbs, documentary, Hot Peppers, Guinness World Record, Hottest Pepper, Ghost Peppers, Ghost Pepper, Travel & Adventure, Peppers, Spicy, Hot, Red Habanero, Carolina Reaper, Burning, Flavors, Extra Hot, Hot sauce, Farm, Carolina Reaper Pepper, Scoville scale, Secret specimens, Famous, Infamous, Milk, Ed Currie, Hotter, Hottest, Biography & Profile, Extra Spicy, spiciest pepper, spicy pepper challenge, hottest ones, hot chili peppers, carolina reaper challenge, piri piri

Id: hrF3jVppfr4

Length: 3min 19sec (199 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2017