It wasn’t long before another pepper came along to usurp the ghost pepper’s position as the hottest. However, due to its initially viral spread through popular culture (in particular, YouTube videos of people taking the so-called ‘ghost pepper challenge’), many people still believe it is the hottest pepper in the world. The Bhut Jolokia can be said to be the one pepper that really got the ball rolling in the domain of insanely hot peppers.

Since the introduction of the ghost pepper into the world of hot foods there has been a veritable windfall of superhot peppers around the world. It’s as if that the moment it was discovered it was conceivable for peppers to be cultivated to be that hot, the rest of the world took it on as a challenge.

The designation of the hottest pepper in the world is complicated. While the Scoville scale and the HPLC tests are both used to classify heat there is often a lack of consensus on how exactly to implement them universally.

It was only a few years ago, that the Chile Pepper Institute, which is considered at the forefront of chile pepper studies and research, conducted the first-ever scientific study comparing so-called super hot varieties of chiles to each other. This is super important: until then, there was no other other “official” source for rating a pepper’s piquancy. And online, you can find just about anybody stating they have the newest, hottest pepper based on some dubious rating. The debate continues to rage about what peppers are the hottest and what the specific criteria should be even, in spite of official claims. The top two hottest peppers in the world still continue to garner controversy.