Turning up the heat

More precisely, it's a chilli pepper which produces long, slender, cayenne-style fruits which go down great in hot sauces and which will also dry out nicely to produce red-hot powders.

The fruits ripen dark bottle-green to red, and a plant (like the one pictured, from seedsmen T&M and sown indoors in the last week of March) can produce a heck of a lot of fruits.

Sow the seeds, two or three to a small pot, from March to April in a warm, light place and give them a couple of weeks to show their heads above the compost.Transplant the seedlings into three-inch pots when large enough to handle into and then re-pot into a six-inch, or even bigger pot.

For indoor crops, you can plant into growbags or pots. For outdoor crops, acclimatise plants to outdoor conditions for a few days before planting in sunny, fertile, moist, well-drained soil.

Feed weekly with tomato fertiliser once the first fruits have set. I used Tomorite until it suddenly disappeared off the shelves as everyone else in the country decided they wanted some. Now, I'm feeding them with Miracle-Gro; it smells a bit, but the peppers seem to like it.

Now that's got the cultivation notes out of the way, it's time to to take a closer look at the humble chilli.

While Pinocchio's Nose can certainly pack a punch, it's just a pussycat when compared with the likes of the tongue-burning power of the Bhut Jolokia chilli, which is recognised as the hottest in the world.

Until a few years ago, it was a chilli known as Red Savina which held the crown, with a heat rating of 580,000 SHUs.

But the Jolokia chilli was tested at an incredible 1,001,304 SHUs, almost twice the heat of the previous record holder.SHUs are Scoville heat units, which are named after their creator, chemist Wilbur Scoville, who, in 1912, devised the system to measure the "hotness" of a chilli pepper.

These fruits of the Capsicum genus contain capsaicin, a chemical compound which stimulates thermoreceptor nerve endings in the skin, and the number of SHUs indicates the amount of capsaicin present.

Not many people (sane or otherwise) would really want a chilli as hot as the Jolokia, but it's nice to know it's out there if you want to test your taste-buds to the limit.

I have grown quite attached to the roof of my mouth, so, for the moment, Pinocchio's Nose will do me fine.

YP MAG 28/8/10