So God Made the World's Hottest Pepper
Meet the Carolina Reaper. It is an evil looking pepper—a gnarled, lumpy pod with a sucked-up belly and a small tail reminiscent of wasp’s stinger. When ripe it is a luscious Crayola red. Its looks are a carefully crafted marketing scheme that screams “Danger: Do Not Eat.” But it was those looks that immediately drew Ed Currie, a South Carolina chili pepper grower, to the Carolina Reaper, the latest and most controversial contender for the crown of world’s hottest pepper.
Like any human endeavor involving pride and money, the competition for the world’s hottest pepper, especially in the United States, is cutthroat and, to make matters worse, there currently is no undisputed champion.
“It is highly competitive and there is a lot of infighting,” says Ted Barrus, a well-known reviewer of —peppers reaching over one million heat units (at least three times as hot as a typical habanero)—famous for his YouTube videos under the moniker. “It’s a big money thing to have the world record.”
