'Pepper X' Creator Ed Currie Answers Hot Pepper Questions

I'm Smokin' Ed Currie.

I'm a professional hot sauce maker and pepper breeder.

I bred the Smokin' Ed's Carolina Reaper and Pepper X

and I'm here to answer your burning hot pepper questions.

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Help. My mouth is on fire. What do I do?

What do you do? You enjoy it.

There's actually nothing you can do once you feel that heat.

That is a chemical reaction

with a nerve receptor that our brain perceives as heat.

It's just gonna keep on burning no matter what you do.

What you should not do is chug milk,

ice cream, or things like that.

You're gonna feel temporary relief.

And then as soon as your saliva eats through carbohydrates,

which it does really quick,

you're gonna be back to being hot again.

So you're gonna eat more carbs, then go back to being hot,

eat more carbs, eat more carbs, eat more carbs.

Then you're gonna regurgitate, you're gonna say,

oh, that pepper made me throw up.

And it's not, it's the half gallon of ice cream

you just ate in a three minute period.

If you want anything to happen, get some citric acid,

you know, pineapple juice, lemon juice, grapefruit juice,

lime juice, put it in your mouth, swoosh it around.

It's gonna break up that oil that's holding the capsaicin.

It might make things a little hotter temporarily,

but it will get it out of your mouth

and away from those receptors and you can either spit it out

or put it down into your gullet.

What is the Scoville scale and how does it work?

The Scoville heat scale was originally how much water

it took to dilute a pepper

to the point where you couldn't taste any heat.

When we got into the seventies, we had chemistry instruments

that could measure the actual capsaicin in the pepper.

We dehydrate peppers and after a long and boring process,

we get the graph that we can use that mathematical equation

and what it does is measure the heat of a pepper.

Will peppers kill my taste buds?

No peppers will not kill your taste buds.

The reaction that you're feeling as a burn

has nothing to do with your taste buds.

The heat that you're experiencing your mouth is not real.

It has nothing to do with your taste buds.

Your brain's the only thing experiencing it

and letting you know that that's happening.

The next question is kind of silly.

It says, can I die from eating a hot pepper?

No, you cannot die from eating a hot pepper,

with the caveat,

if you have a predisposition to an allergy to nightshades.

So if you're allergic tomatoes or allergic to eggplant,

don't eat peppers, oka, they're all the same family.

Can I overdose on hot peppers?

I'm here to testify. Yes, you can.

I've been so high on peppers that I couldn't drive.

I've been so high on peppers that I had to lay down

on the cold floor and just sit there and shake for a while.

I'm talking about the same thing as a runner's high.

When the capsaicin gets into your bloodstream

and gets to your brain,

it fills the dopamine receptors in your brain

that narcotics do.

So it releases a huge quantity

of endorphin and dopamine into your body.

The hotter the pepper, the more that happens.

The more you eat, the more that happens.

You get little tingles all over your scalp

and down the back of your neck,

and it's just like ooh and and you feel light, euphoric.

It's almost like an out-of-body experience.

It's gonna end in about a half hour

and you can go back to whatever you were doing.

Why are the seeds the spiciest part of the pepper?

There is no heat in the seed.

What is hot is the membrane that's around the seed

and the pit that it's attached to.

Let me give you an example.

We'll use this habanero right here.

Always carry your pepper knife with you.

You never know when you're gonna have fresh peppers.

So inside, you see this white stuff here?

That is the capsaicin producing glands of the pepper.

The seeds happen to be next to it

and they're not hot at all,

once you wash 'em and clean 'em.

Is there a trick for getting the burn of the pepper

off your eyes or your skin?

The only thing I've really found that helps

to get it outta my skin is to take a little water,

go outside and pour it on the ground, get a mud going.

You plaster it all over your hands

and you let it sit there for a little while

and then you wash it off and it seems to work the best,

of all the wives' tales I've heard.

I wouldn't recommend putting it on your eyes,

'cuz who wants to get dirt in their eyes?

Can I get better at eating hot peppers?

When I say get better at eating peppers,

I'm equating that to heat tolerance.

My experience is anybody can get better

at eating hot peppers.

Your body will become acclimated to the amount of capsaicin

that you're consuming at any given time,

and then it will allow you to eat more.

Always remember you start mild and then go to wild.

Do not dive into the deep end of the pool.

What is the hottest thing you've ever eaten?

Well, the hottest thing I ever ate

was the standard capsaicin,

that we use to standardize the HPLC machine

before we're doing a test.

The standard that we use for the HPLC machine

is a powder that is 16.6 million Scoville heat units.

It was the stupidest thing I ever did.

My face was numb for a good four or five hours.

I looked like I was gonna die.

There was just drool coming outta my mouth

and all down my shirt.

My wife walked away from me.

It was horrible.

The second time I did it, I just put some on my finger,

and I rubbed it on my gums and that was even stupider.

That one took like four hours to go away.

I was in a fetal position for most of those four hours

and I did not know where I was.

It is the stupidest thing I've ever done.

How did you make the hottest pepper on earth?

Well, I did make the hottest pepper on the earth.

I made Smokin' Ed's Carolina Reaper,

the cross between a pepper from the island of St. Vincent,

called La Soufrière, off the volcano there,

and a Pakistani Naga.

But I wasn't looking to make

the hottest pepper in the world,

but the first time I tried the reaper,

it knocked me to my knees.

Okay, the next question is,

does hot sauce need to be refrigerated?

Most of the hot sauces that are manufactured properly

and done legally are gonna be a pH between 4.0 and 3.6.

If hot sauce is made properly and it has the right pH,

there's no need to refrigerate it.

The FDA says it's good for two years.

Science that we use to test for the FDA

says it's good for seven to ten years.

The reason why hot sauce makers put,

refrigerate after opening on a bottle,

is so you the consumer won't sue them the manufacturer,

if something goes wrong with the hot sauce.

99.9% of the time,

when something goes wrong with the hot sauce,

it's because when people are using it,

they take the bottle of sauce

and they go like this into their food,

and they're getting food particles on the bottle

and in the sauce, that grows into bad stuff.

But all of the hot sauces

that are sitting on this table right now,

I would feel comfortable leaving all of them on the table

for as long as I had that bottle open.

All right, here's a silly question.

Is Texas Pete a real guy?

If you've seen the character that is on the bottle

and you find a man that looks like that,

I'll pay you 20 bucks.

Okay, I'll give you a hundred bucks.

The next question is, can spicy foods cure a head cold?

I believe nothing can cure a cold,

but can they make it less painful and less annoying?

Yes, they can.

By eating spicy foods,

you're gonna have your mucus membranes run

and it's gonna drain that cold feeling out of you.

Is it true that spicy foods can affect your metabolism?

Well, hell yes. Look at me.

I've been going since eight o'clock this morning

eating spicy foods and I'm really ready to go.

I'm gonna jog all the way back to Brooklyn.

Scientifically, the spicier the pepper,

the higher the effect that it has on your metabolism.

So if you eat, say this poblano pepper,

nothing's gonna happen to you.

This is a thousand Scoville heat units.

But if you eat this orange habanero,

which is about a hundred thousand Scoville heat units,

you're gonna get about a 12 to 14% raise in your heart rate.

When you eat a really, really hot pepper,

like the Carolina Reaper, it's been measured

at up to 40% increase in metabolism by eating those peppers.

For someone that doesn't normally eat pepper,

they're gonna have a much more rapid increase in metabolism

due to the fight or flight reaction,

than say someone like me, who eats peppers all the time.

Is it true that chile peppers

can be used in cancer research?

Chile peppers have been used in cancer research

for a long time.

When I started researching 'em,

I looked at populations around the world.

Indigenous populations, hadn't been westernized.

Very, very low experience in cancer and heart disease.

There is a subcapsianoid that has a key on it,

that when you get it to a cancer cell that has that keyhole,

it'll start in autoimmune sequence.

They have been doing the research on how to do this.

Me personally, I think it's by ingesting massive quantities

of super hot peppers every day.

But most chemo patients and people who have cancer

are not gonna be able to eat that much pepper.

So, we let science do the science stuff.

We focus on the hot sauce.

Can spicy foods induce childbirth?

Down in Charlotte, North Carolina,

there is a pizza place that has advertised

that they have a childbirth inducing pizza.

Some of the thoughts behind this,

that might or might not be true,

are that the increase in metabolism

from eating those super hot peppers,

is engorging the uterus with blood

and helping speed along that process.

I can't see how that'd be true,

knowing a little bit about physiology,

but it's what they say.

I think it has nothing to do with nature or science.

How did you become a pepper expert?

Am I an expert?

Most people consider me an expert,

but I think what makes me an expert

is that I know I don't know everything.

I studied it in school in the eighties

and I got the literature I needed to keep on studying it

and then I dabbled in processing in the nineties,

that hands-on gave me more knowledge

and understanding of the literature I was reading,

and then by, you know, the 2010s,

people were coming to me for answers,

instead of me going to them for answers.

Well, I hope you learned today something different

about hot sauce or peppers that you didn't know

and I really, really want you to remember,

it's always best to start mild and work your way up to wild.

You can always get hotter. You can never go back.

This is Smokin' Ed Currie, from Fort Mill, South Carolina.

I'm signing off.

I love y'all. God bless y'all. Have a great day.

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