How This Guy Made the World's Hottest Peppers | Obsessed | WIRED

your hands will start shaking your heart will start going faster you get sweaty your eyes water you your skin flushes the mucous membranes run and so you get snot pouring out your nose edy curry is the evil genius who brought the world the Carolina Reaper the world's hottest hot pepper a Carolina Reaper is a beautiful fruit that is hiding a package of evil inside and it's the hottest pepper in the world I get to hurt people from all over the world every single day I might have a little sadistic streak to me the aptly named curry has been hyper focused on one thing since 1981 hot peppers more specifically he is obsessed with crossbreeding different peppers to make them as hot as possible by upping their level of capsaicin the ingredient that gives hot peppers their heat and a Carolina Reaper is an absolute capsaicin beast I made the Carolina Reaper by breeding a pepper I got from a doctor from Pakistan with a pepper I got from a co-worker at the bank from the island of Saint Vincent I was just trying to raise caps enjoyed levels in the Nagas that I got from Pakistan to see if I could get one of the sub caps you know it's to go higher and we got the Carolina Reaper it was a gift from God in 2013 Cruz favorite pepper was officially crowned the spiciest in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records but how spicy is that everybody knows what a howl opinion is they run between three and five thousand Scoville heat units Thai chilies maybe 20,000 Scoville habaneros on average maybe a hundred thousand then you get into ghost peppers they're really about 600,000 and then you got the Carolina Reaper coming in at one point six four two million Scoville heat units on average with a peak heat of 2.5 million Scoville units we're talking rollerskates to Space Shuttle you know now remember that peppers are organic things with lots of variation including spice and size for example jalapenos tend to range from 3,000 to 8,000 or more Koval heat units and are generally twice as big as a reaper which themselves range from 1.5 million to 2.5 million and he is a subjective thing but still let's try to put it all in perspective roughly 10 spicy habaneros hold the same amount of capsaicin as one reaper you'd need about sixty Serrano's to match a Carolina Reaper and it takes 600 jalapenos give or take a couple hundred to match the amount of capsaicin in one mild equivalently sized Carolina Reaper Carolina Reaper does not do the same thing to me anymore because my body is used to it so I need something hotter curry has bread almost 500 distinct pepper plants constantly trying to push the level of heat one pepper can hold and he's not finished yeah we're we're still breeding peppers that are hotter and hotter and hotter I used to think that about 4.3 million was the hottest you can get a pepper I've already proven myself wrong and science has now proven that we can get a lot hotter than man while the Carolina Reaper still holds the Guinness world record curry says his pepper axe is even hotter it's the main ingredient in this fiery hot sauce the hottest in the hit YouTube series hot ones [Music] to create new super hot peppers curry uses a pretty straightforward crossbreeding technique interbreeding two different pepper plants hoping to combine attractive traits into a brand new plant it's the same method human use to turn a gray wolf into the Chihuahua the Bulldog and even the poodle except plants need a little more help it's a 50/50 crapshoot but we look for a really nice flower and we use these paintbrushes to go around the flower and pull the pollen out and then when you have enough of the pollen you go to the female and you paint that power on to the flowers and then you do this process over and over and over again it takes patience to create a new breed a lot of patience plants in the first generation tend to carry a lot of their parents traits breeders can start to tease out specific traits in the subsequent generations through selective breeding it generally takes about eight to ten generations to stabilize a hybridization and get predictable traits and consistent fruit if we get desirable traits like high indices of any of the caps e Nuits who are looking for them will keep on going on the cross if it doesn't work then we got to start all over again and it's a very time-consuming very long process curry grew up gardening so this level of botanical knowledge is second nature to him my mother was a Master Gardener and she taught me how to breed plants and irises lilies you know different things up in Michigan so that's where I literally got that and I took it to the dope level I started trying to crossbreed pot when I was younger and it was dangerous so he decided to grow something else and land it on super hot peppers like the Carolina Reaper I was on a search for hotter things that I could get and this was a Vietnamese restaurant that specialized in spicy food and I asked them to make it the hottest they could and they said no no and I said yeah yeah yeah and when I eat it I got a rush I got I literally got a rush like I was taking some dope curry has been sober for over 20 years now but he says that a natural high has kept him going producing and eating hotter and hotter peppers when I first ate the reaper it knocked me to my knees I was like 3 years clean I hadn't felt that feeling in a long time I knew that was hot you get this like euphoric feeling and that's your body trying to overtake the pain that the chemical reaction is giving and eventually the endorphin rush overtakes the pain and when you get into the higher pain you get the more pleasure so it's just chasing the dragon as crazed tolerance grew and grew his pepper growing hobby ballooned into a full-on all-encompassing lifestyle when I met my wife she wouldn't have anything to do with me she called me a funny little man when I asked for a number she said not a chance in hell you know but I heard she liked salsa and I was growing tomatoes and peppers and stuff so I whipped up some peach mango salsa and she talked to me we got married 9 months later so I put like 1,400 plants in her backyard and we were making hot sauce and salsa with with what we weren't using you know inbreeding and that's also won her over she convinced him to start selling his sauces instead of giving them away so he started pucker but pepper company and in 2012 he quit his high paying job in banking to dive headfirst into spicy peppers approximately 4:00 a.m. every morning I start sorting through those peppers to sort for grade to sort for color and I separate them into the mash peppers the seedings peppers the ones I want to eat and the ones were going to dry curry grows peppers he makes hot sauce he makes salsa he makes mash and mustard he drives the whole fruit and makes beef jerky he even saves the seeds last count I think there was 3,800 seeds in my office different types and we've cut more stash all over the plate I think we're around seven thousand seeds different types of seeds some of those are going to be for sale to the public some of them will never be to sale for to the public some go to the medical community and some are just because I'm an addict and I can't stop you know I can't stop collecting them but capsaicin is a strong strong irritant to our skin eyes and lungs and there's so much of it in reapers that caution is needed while handling them when people are seeding they wear double gloves because the oil inside the peppers will actually eat through nitrile gloves but that's not because they're protecting their hands my hands are on fire all the time that's because they're protecting the soft pots of their body they take their gloves off before they go to the bathroom see where I was touching those peppers earlier is on fire right now the air is actually spicy for more than 100 years peppers have been measured using the Scoville scale it was started by Wilbur Scoville in 1912 originally the level of spice was determined by five individual taste testers but today the level of heat is measured in a lab and so curry knows exactly how dangerous his peppers are it was subjective then now it's analytical everybody uses the same process no one's tastes are involved if you put my wife and had her eat a reaper she would tell you it's 10 million Scoville if you have me did I'll say it's a hundred thousand you know that's subjective the machine doesn't lie it measures everything the same way curry works with a local chemist to find out exactly how much capsaicin is packed into his peppers we grind those peppers and emulsify them and then we pump them through a machine called an HPLC a high-performance liquid chromatograph and that measures the different properties that are in a pepper you can go for the tannins cap see noise flavonoids coloring agents what whatever you want to do we analyzed all of it there's a very specific math equation that you put the area of the peaks in to be come up with the Scoville heat units all this obsession with heat might seem crazy but it couldn't come at a better time America's appetite for spice is getting bigger and bigger every year the u.s. hot sauce industry saw a 150 percent growth from 2000 to 14 with steady increases since then today it's 1.5 billion dollar industry in the United States I believe it's costly changing demographic of America they brought with them food that we never had before I mean when I was growing up there were no Thai restaurants there were no African restaurants Caribbean restaurants Indian restaurants but as the demographic of America change they brought in their food cultures and we got exposed to that and then there's the internet where people post painful videos of themselves eating peppers constantly hot sauce is now a mainstream thing people are always doing some crazy stunt with it this didn't happen 10 years ago for those of you out there that want to eat a whole Carolina Reaper I highly recommend that you do not do it despite these warnings business is good and curry gets to spend most of his days surrounded by what he loves the most I get out of bed at 3:30 in the morning just to go and play with peppers and I stay there all day long on fire eating them all day long this is my happy place [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 12,070,601

Rating: 4.9121842 out of 5

Keywords: first we feast hot sauce, hot sauce, obsessed, ott obsessed, peppers, hot peppers, carolina reaper, carolina reaper pepper, hot pepper, ed currie, ed currie hot sauce, ed currie hot peppers, how hot peppers are made, hot peppers made, carolina reaper peppers, wired hot peppers, wired peppers, obsessed peppers, puckerbutt, puckerbutt pepper company, peppers hot, hottest peppers, hottest peppers in the world, world's hottest peppers, eating peppers, pepper x, wired

Id: 1uNpjqH-mQQ

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/pxan]

I love how ugly the peppers are. They scream, "We're breeding for heat, not for winning beauty pageants."

[u/chellecakes]

Total respect for this guy. Isn't he the one who got off opioids and replaced them with capsaicin?

[u/JB_THE_QUEEF]

Ed curry, he is the man

[u/panopanopano]

When this man’s body is buried they’ll have to put him in a lead lined concrete box with regular IAEA monitoring!

[u/UseDaSchwartz]

I didn’t watch the video but I’ve heard this guy has several unreleased peppers that are hotter than his current world record. If someone breaks his record, he’ll just release one of those.

[u/theradek123]

This guy and his peppers were also featured on a Netflix series about crazy contests - recommend that one too

[u/Yashkamr]

This guy's passion for peppers makes me jealous. I wish I could be that passionate about anything these days.

[u/_GoKartMozart_]

Hey I saw this guy on Netflix's "We are the Champions". Fun show but the first episode is the best and then it's downhill from there imo.

[u/OSUfan88]

Title should have been “Worlds Hottest Man”.