Carolina Reaper Peppers: How to Cook With Carolina Reapers

The Carolina Reaper is an exceptionally hot chili pepper cultivated from the Capsicum chinense plant species. The pepper is small, ranging from one to two inches wide and two to three inches long. It is named in honor of its small, pointy tail, which looks a bit like the Grim Reaper's sickle.

Ed Currie, U.S. chili pepper breeder and owner of the Puckerbutt Pepper Company, bred the Carolina Reaper pepper, which is also known as the HP22B pepper. To create it, he crossed a Pakistani Naga Viper pepper with a La Sourfrière pepper, a type of red habanero pepper from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. By 2013, seven generations of the plant grew in his South Carolina greenhouse.

The Scoville scale is the official measurement for the heat level of chili peppers. It measures a chili pepper's spiciness or pungency in Scoville Heat Units, or SHUs. Scoville units are based on the concentration of capsaicin and other capsaicinoids, the chemical irritants that give chili peppers their heat. The official SHU level of the Carolina Reaper is 1,641,183 SHUs, according to tests conducted at South Carolina's Winthrop University in 2017.

For comparison purposes with other hot peppers, a jalapeño pepper averages about 5,000 SHUs. That means the Carolina Reaper is almost 400 times as hot as a jalapeño. If you're a fan of super-hot peppers, you've probably sampled the ghost pepper, originally cultivated in India, where it’s known as bhut jolokia. Ghost peppers average about 950,000 SHUs—so Carolina Reapers are almost twice as hot.

While some have described the sensation of eating a Carolina Reaper as akin to swallowing lava, the pepper is unexpectedly fruity in taste. This delivers a sense of sweetness on the tongue before the extreme heat sets in.

The Carolina Reaper chili pepper is relatively easy to grow at home starting with Carolina Reaper seeds, though you may require a greenhouse depending on your local climate. The peppers require growing temperatures of sixty-four to sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Growing them in smaller pots of twelve to sixteen inches helps the plants produce fruit more quickly. Planted directly in a garden bed, the Carolina Reaper pepper plant can reach a height of four feet.

As of 2017, the Guinness Book of World Records lists the Carolina Reaper was the world's hottest pepper with a rating of 1,641,183 SHUs. The previous record-holder was the Trinidad Scorpion pepper, which is indigenous to Trinidad and Tobago and unofficially known as the "Butch T" pepper.

A couple of other peppers have recently come close to toppling the Carolina Reaper from its ranking as the spiciest pepper in the world. The Dragon's Breath pepper, developed by Wales breeder Mike Smith at Nottingham Trent University, hit 2.4 million SHUs in individual tests, but Guinness was unable to confirm those results. Ed Currie himself, the producer of the Carolina Reaper, also claims his Pepper X hits 3.18 million SHUs.

You can use the Carolina Reaper when cooking spicy foods—but be careful not to overdo it. If you're a hot sauce fan, make your own hot sauce with Carolina Reapers (but make sure use the peppers sparingly). Carolina Reapers can be canned and dehydrated, and they're ideal for use in pepper jellies (again, sparingly).

Once you've dehydrated a Carolina Reaper into a powder or flake form, you have what you need to spice up soups, pots of stew, or chilis. You can also use tiny amounts of Carolina Reaper pepper powder as a dry rub on barbecued meats or jerky, or stir a tiny bit into Thai, Mexican, or Indian dishes to bring up the heat. The initial sweetness of the Carolina Reaper allows for the fascinating experience of the flavor of your dishes changing on the tongue as you eat.

For your own safety and comfort, it's best to wear gloves while working with the Carolina Reaper in the kitchen. No matter what, don't touch your eyes while cooking with Carolina Reapers—not until you've first washed your hands thoroughly.

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