Digonta Saikia, an Indian farmer who grows ghost peppers, told NBC News that eating one of these peppers is ‘like dying’ because they are so intensely spicy. The heat begins to cool down about half an hour after starting to eat. Your upper body might break into a sweat and your heart might beat faster when you eat a ghost pepper. Eating just a small piece can also make your eyes water. Your lips, gums and inside of your mouth will likely sting quite painfully as well. At the very least, you’ll experience a painful, stinging sensation on your tongue when you eat a ghost pepper.

However, about 45 seconds after putting in your mouth, the fiery sensation starts and continues to intensify for a further 10 to 15 minutes. In comparison: that is four hundred (400!) times hotter than Tabasco.Įating a ghost pepper is tricky because when you first put it in your mouth, it has a sweet flavor. The orange and red little lady rated over 1 million Scoville heat units, a range that identifies how spicy a pepper is. In fact, from 2007 until 2010 Guinness World Records stated that the ghost pepper was the hottest. Since the pepper is easy to grow and to cross breed, many varieties of these ladies popped up around the world with the ghost pepper being currently one of the hottest varieties on this little blue planet. In some places people liked their food hotter than elsewhere. She showed up in kitchens, wrapping cuisines around her delicious little finger from Morocco to Hungary, and India to China. When Columbus’s ships brought them back to Spain, traders spread them around the world and the pepper became an instant hit everywhere. He was a bit off the mark as the world soon figured out, but the names had stuck even though the native peoples of the Americas had been growing and enjoying sweet and hot peppers for an estimated 7,000 years. When Columbus tasted the small, hot red “berries” he found on his Caribbean voyages, he believed he had reached India where Europeans obtained black pepper and called them red pepper. They are not related to that other pepper, Piper nigrum, you grind on your food.

They are members of the nightshade family, which also includes potatoes, tomatoes and eggplant. A term that derives from the Greek word kapto, which means ‘to gulp’.

Peppers, whether sweet or hot, are members of the plant genus capsicum. Some of these ladies are hotter than then the others though, and some are almost too hot to handle. Pure veggie eye candies, these ladies in their bright colored dresses are an easy sell. Just the way you like it.īy Marco Barneveld, Peppers are the belles of the ball at any buffet table. So you like it more than hot? You want the heat of the sun to enter the sanctuary of your vegetable plate? You like it hotter than magma? Meet miss ghost pepper and her fiery friends.

Ghost pepper