How to estimate Scoville level of home-made pepper sauce??
I am making a sauce that has:-
3 Ghost peppers,
1 Cherry Bomb pepper,
1 Jalapeño pepper,
1 Habanero pepper,
1 Lady Finger pepper.
It also has Tabasco sauce and Cayenne pepper.
My friends want to know what the Scoville level might be.
Best Answer
This can be a party activity for your friends. The Scoville test is a dilution test, so you can reproduce it at home at least as far as informing your friends is concerned.
- Get a lot of distilled water and a bunch of milk and plain bread.
- Create dilutions of the hot sauce by adding 1ml of hot sauce to each of 250ml, 500ml, 1000ml, 2l, 5l, and 10l of distilled water.
- Have each of three friends blind taste test the diluted sauce against a glass of plain distilled water, starting with the most diluted.
- Cleanse palates between rounds with bread & milk.
The dilution at which the hot sauce's heat cannot be tasted by any of your friends reliably is its approximate Scoville rating. Yes, it's not quite how the actual Scoville test works in the lab, but even if you don't get a rating out of it, it'll be a fun thing for your pepper-loving friends to do on a Sunday afternoon.
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How do you calculate the Scoville of hot sauce?
The standard used to calibrate the calculation is 1 gram of capsaicin. Scoville heat units are found by multiplying the ppmH value by a factor of 15.How do you measure Scoville units at home?
To determine the Scoville Heat Unit, an alcohol extract of capsaicin oil from a dried pepper is mixed with a solution of water and sugar to the point where a panel of human taste-testers can't detect the heat of the pepper.How many Scoville units is capsaicin sauce?
On the Scoville heat scale pure capsaicin has a value of 15 000 000 to 16 000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU). To put this into perspective, standard pepper spray (as used in self-defence) has a rating of between 2 000 000 and 5 300 000 SHU.How many Scoville units is a normal pepper?
The ranges of Scoville Heat Units (SHU) typically used to call a pepper mild, medium, hot, or extra hot are: Mild (100 to 2,500) Medium (2,500 to 30,000) Hot (30,000 to 100,000)Scoville Heat Unit Meter for Home Use?
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Answer 2
I doubt anyone can say with any real accuracy & without a test lab.
For a guess, with no real reason to believe it will be accurate…
Take the values of each multiplied by the number of 'elements' & divide that figure by the total elements. Then divide again for any 'thinners', water, oil etc.
For the Tabasco & cayenne you'll have to work out what constitutes 'one element', as scoville is not concerned with quantity, per se.
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Images: Tom Adabi, Pixabay, Malidate Van, cottonbro