If you visit Google today, and of course you will, you will see a Google doodle that may make you a little hot under the collar. It's an adorable drawing of Wilbur Scoville, the first guy to turn hot-pepper-eating into more than just a college hazing ritual. Scoville is responsible for the Scoville Scale, also known as the Scoville Organoleptic Test, which measures the heat of spicy peppers.
The Scoville Scale was the first scale to scientifically measure spicy-heat. Scoville himself came up with the method in 1912, which was cleverly designed to take into account both human taste and scientific accuracy.
To test a pepper, human subjects eat it in various diluted forms, until the average subject can no longer taste it. For example, it might take 600 dilutions to stop tasting Tabasco sauce, but up to 2 million dilutions to stop tasting common pepper spray. Because each dilution represents the exact same amount of subtracted spice, we're able to come to a common language to describe the spiciness of any pepper.
To test a pepper's Scoville rating, it's important to have a lot of tasters (since your aunt Shirley might be incredibly tolerant to peppers, while your uncle Bill still thinks ketchup is spicy). It's also important not to overload tasters with too many samples. To get an accurate reading, the tasters should start with a clean palate. If they've just tasted three other samples, chances are that will muck up their reading of the next sample.
Today's Google Doodle links to a game where you can use another method to overcome the spiciness of various peppers: by throwing ice cream at them. Ice cream and other milk products are a go-to solution for eating too much spice, because the fatty content of the milk binds with the capsaicin oil and carries it down into your stomach. Then you get to experience the spice again ... a little later.
Thanks, Wilbur Scoville, for giving us a scientific reason not to eat Mace pepper spray.
