Scoville Scale - Determination of pungency of chilli sauces

A few weeks ago I have been to a spice museum and beside all these flavours and odurs in the air their have been a section decidated for chili peppers and chilli sauce only.

At the exhibition different pepper types have been introduced to the vistor, among them the TOP 3 on the scoville scale. The scoville scale is a scale to determine the spiciness of chilli peppers in SHU scoville heat units. It ranges from 0 to 16.000.000 SHU. With 0 being no pungency at all and 16.000.000 being the highest.

The scale is based on the qualitative principle of diluting the chilli sauce with water and let selected probands taste it and let them determine the pungency present. Because this was a really subjective way (sometimes variances of about +/-50%) and not really scaleable approach the chilli pepper industry abandoned this test at some point.

And this is where LCMS comes into play. Chilli peppers belong to the taxomonic family as potatos, eggplant and deadly nightshade - they are solanaceae. A plant family which is known to syntheses alkaloids. The pungency of chilli peppers is proportionally related to endgoneous alkaloid capsaicin/dihydrocapsaicin and it's concentration can be determined with LCMS. After successfull identification and quantification the capsaicin concentations can be converted (multiplying them with a factor of 15) to SHU. A really nice way to relate and appreciate former achivement and traditions in the field.