It looks harmless, even cheerful, with its shiny red skin and soft green leaves.

But make no mistake, the Carolina Reaper is a weapons-grade pepper, the hottest in the world, and Marpole resident Brad Dodds has them growing in his backyard.

Dodds ordered the seeds “on a lark” from the Reaper’s inventor, the PuckerButt Pepper Company in South Carolina, and has been trying for two years to grow them. The first crop flowered, but didn’t fruit. But this year’s unusually warm spring and hot summer has Dodds’s four plants sporting dozens of little Reapers.

On a recent afternoon, Dodds let The Sun tag along as he and three friends sampled one for the first time.

It was a moment Dodds said he was both looking forward to and dreading, as the Reaper has a fearsome reputation. It is about 300 times hotter than a habanero and 400 times hotter than the average jalapeño. The Internet is full of videos of people vomiting after ingesting the smallest of pieces.

Ed Currie, the South Carolina breeder who created the Reaper, said in a phone interview he will never forget the first time he ate one.

“I actually hallucinated ... It gives you an endorphin release kind of along the lines of getting high,” he said. “I got two of my friends to come over that evening for dinner with their wives and they took a bite and they both threw up.”

The people who handle the peppers to harvest seeds and make sauces typically wear two pairs of surgical gloves because the oil from the peppers will eat through a single one in about 10 minutes, Currie said.

So it was gingerly that Dodds picked the smoothest, reddest pepper he could find — about the size of a walnut — and cut it up carefully on a plate. Oil oozed slowly out of it.

He cut pieces roughly the size of quarters, but cut them in half after friends objected that they were too big.

“Holy shit,” he said after putting the first piece in his mouth. “I can’t feel the end of my tongue.”

But while there were a couple of coughs and a few tears, especially a few minutes in when the heat really started to build, the famed Carolina Reaper was no match for the four steel-mouthed men gathered in Marpole that afternoon.

“Not as hot as I was expecting. Way more flavourful,” Dodds said.

“Tastes like a smoked orange ... (but) way hotter,” said friend Vaughn Pease.

There may even be a silver lining in the Reaper’s aftermath. A study published in the British Medical Journal last month found consumption of spicy foods corresponded with lower mortality levels, independent of other risk factors.

This is part of the reason Currie, a former banker, started breeding the peppers.

“I found out when I was young I was going to die of cancer or heart disease,” he said, explaining there is a history of both in his family and the men, in particular, tended to die in their early 60s. “I didn’t want to die because I wanted to keep on partying.”

Currie gives some of his peppers to medical researchers looking into the health effects of capsaicin, which is what gives peppers their bite.

“I believe that capsaicin holds the key to killing cancer.”

tcarman@vancouversun.com

twitter.com/tarajcarman

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