'A Guide to Hot Chile Peppers'

Right here.

Pictured up top is the world's hottest chile pepper, the Bhut Jolokia.

With 1,001,304 Scoville Heat Units, it's nearly twice as hot as Red Savina, the former record holder.

For reference, a New Mexico green chile measures about 1,500 SHUs and and your average jalapeño around 10,000 SHUs.

Do the math.

But if all those zeros make your head spin, allow my crack math team to perform the calculation — in its collective head! (they're that good) — and report that the Bhut Jolokia is about 100 times hotter than a jalapeño.

Smokin'.

bookofjoe last visited the hot pepper space nearly three years ago, on November 23, 2004, so it was probably time.

[Just in from my semi-crazed, half-delirious Indianapolis, Indiana correspondent clifyt, who writes, "Just continuing my duties and finding cool things to forward to you to say 'NO, THIS STUFF SUCKS, GO FIND SOMETHING INTERESTING!' — I found this on the Chef From Hell blog — www.hellchef.com/foodblog/2007/9/23/a-guide-to-hot-chile-peppers.html

Ok, back to nursing my sunburn from hanging out on the Outer Banks of North Carolina while sitting here in an oncology research lab at Duke University where my friends are actually speaking English for once, but I am even more clueless about the conversation than I am when they are shouting at me in German :-)

clif"]