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mapt 8 hours ago

Data quality on Scoville is unfortunately garbage; Testing is expensive and both individual plants and individual growers/fields are highly variable, so nearly everyone is playing 'telephone' making subjective claims in relation to "known" standard varieties which are also usually subjective claims.

"Slightly hotter than a Jalapeno" means very little when a Jalapeno is anywhere from 3,000 scoville to 60,000 scoville.

TechSquidTV 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've learned in the course of making this site, that pretty much all information about peppers is garbage. That's half the reason I wanted to start this.

philipkglass 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How expensive is testing now? It looks like the standard method is HPLC analysis of capsaicinoids. I found old forum posts from about 10 years ago indicating $50-$65 per test from providers including SBL, which doesn't sound bad, but I don't know if prices have gone up recently.

TechSquidTV 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Part of the issue is that there's a massive variety between peppers, and genetic diversity is incredibly wide, making it nearly impossible to determine the exact type of pepper you have. There are a few different universities and governments that "certify" peppers, but they aren't connected in any way.

philipkglass 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking about testing a particular pepper you have for chemical content, but genetic testing and mapping results to pepper type names does sound more complicated/expensive.