Up and down the country a small but dedicated bunch of festival-goers are preparing for the biggest date in the summer calendar. As headliners, the Wurzels can’t really compete with Kanye. But, fortunately, live music isn’t Upton Cheney’s primary draw. The weather doesn’t even matter because a heatwave is guaranteed: this weekend marks the final of the UK Chilli Cook-Off, a hotly contested title, both literally and metaphorically.

But the Upton Cheney Chilli Festival, which takes place near Bristol, isn’t all about cooking. It’s just one event in a summer calendar that sees tens of thousands turn out to celebrate the chilli in all its forms. Stereotype has it that Brits like their food bland, but it seems the nation has gone chilli mad. Chilli shops, saucemakers and farms of varying scales have sprung up all over the place in the past decade, from Devon to Scotland, with some farms making profits of more than £250,000 a year and exporting to the likes of Mexico and Pakistan in deals the Department of the Environment announced to be worth £1.3m to the British economy. According to figures from Euromonitor International, the UK hot sauce market is now worth more than £17m. And the festivals are multiplying – there are at least 10 this month, from Bath to Scotland, culminating with London’s Festival Of Heat on the 27 September. Even if they’re not cooking, chilli heads like to compete, usually by munching on raw peppers of escalating firepower or ingesting superhot sauces (the last one to reach for the milk wins). At one festival I watched a contestant spoon hot sauce from a jar as if it was yoghurt. Most of the people who turn out will be browsing stalls for new and exciting hot sauces, chilli-infused oils and other chilli-based products to take home.

Even Tesco has got in on the act, last month unveiling the komodo dragon, a pepper grown by Salvatore Genovese in Bedfordshire, and hailed as the UK’s hottest. They look like small, elongated scotch bonnets while the label “Do not touch without gloves” gives some indication of the pepper’s firepower. It boasts 1.4m Scoville units – the official measure of a chilli’s heat. In comparison, the average jalapeño pepper is around 3,500, the bird’s eye (used in Thai cooking) up to 100,000. The world’s hottest chilli, as listed in the Guinness Book Of Records, is the Carolina Reaper, with an average of a little more than 1.5m Scoville units.

Salvatore Genovese picks komodo dragons on his Bedfordshire farm. Photograph: PR

Genovese’s is the UK’s largest chilli farm, producing 15m peppers a year. “Chilli peppers have really grown in popularity over the past 10 years,” he says. “But it’s the really hot ones that gain the most interest and so each year I try and grow one hotter than the last.”

It’s true that many chilli heads are real heatseekers. Online videos abound of men, women and children (although, to be honest, mainly men) crying and vomiting as they eat super-hot peppers and down whole bottles of sauce. David Floyd, author of The Hot Book Of Chillies, and its forthcoming 101 Chillies To Try Before You Die, agrees: “It’s a macho-man thing. I used to sell chilli sauces and lads would come up – whatever you said was hottest, they’d try that.” Sometimes chillies alone aren’t enough to satisfy the demand for fire, even such fearsome peppers as the komodo’s predecessors, the dorset naga and the (deceptively innocently named) Katie. Some sauce-makers add pure capsaicin extract, a distillation of the compound that gives chillies their heat. More often than not the bottles come bearing heavy metal-style skulls and/or graphically scatological names such as Ass In The Tub Armageddon.

Feel the burn … chilli products whose selling point is their extreme heat. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/REX Shutterstock

But while self-induced diarrhoea may be the goal for some, there are actually many health benefits associated with chilli eating. Their analgesic properties were known to the ancient Mexicans who cultivated peppers from 3500 BC and many recent studies (although some fairly preliminary) have suggested they have antiviral benefits, perhaps as a result of capsaicin’s sinus-clearing effects. They are rich in vitamins A and C, as well as antioxidants with cancer-preventing potential, and there is a certain amount of evidence that capsaicin can speed up the body’s metabolism, potentially aiding weight loss.

Thomasina Miers, founder of the Mexican chain Wahaca and author of Chilli Notes: Recipes To Warm The Heart (Not Burn The Tongue) enthuses: “They zhush up your whole digestive system and contain vitamins and minerals that are supposed to be anti-carcinogenic and anti-diabetic. They’re just really good at getting your body to work harder.” They also make you feel good as the body produces endorphins to deal with the capsaicin-induced pain. This is why chillies are often described as addictive but, as Floyd points out: “It’s not addictive like heroin. It’s like exercise.” In fact, Miers suggests: “Chillies could actually be great for alcoholics or anyone trying to give up drink or drugs because of the natural high you get from the endorphins.”

Perhaps it’s the pursuit of this high that explains why the festivals have become so popular in the UK. While Americans have been competitively cooking chilli for decades, the British scene is small but catching up and tends to attract real obsessives who can spend hours debating the merits of beef shin v brisket and comparing arbols and anchos, piquin and pasilla chillies. The UK Chilli Cook-Off Association was only set up five years ago – founder Jon Doody looked for an event like those he had heard about in the US and couldn’t find one, so organised his own at a pub in Reading. At Upton Cheney, 13 teams will cook a gallon of chilli con carne. There is £1,000 at stake, and a place at the World Food Championships in Las Vegas where the grand prize is $25,000 (£16,200) – you can bet that right now competitors are tweaking their spice mixes in preparation and triple-checking the settings on their meat grinder. I know I am. I entered my first event back in 2013 but competition was fierce and I didn’t make the grade. This weekend, my husband and I will be up against the likes of Will Yates, a web designer turned beef jerky manufacturer. He has made it to the last three finals, finishing runnerup last year and now intent on going all the way to Vegas: “It’s something I need to tick off the list,” he says. Yates’s chilli has 45 ingredients, including smoked bone marrow, vanilla, orange juice and salt he sources from Slovenia: “It’s all about the layers,” he says, cryptically.

Sizzling … the dorset naga, which was once the world’s hottest. Photograph: Alamy

Nick Latham is one half of the Wonky Donkey Monsters, two-time UK champions and winners of the People’s Choice award at last year’s World Championship. He and his cooking partner Robb Eadie use four types of meat and their secret is the use of a barbecue, smoking pork over hickory chips for two or three hours before adding it to the pot. “You could use liquid smoke,” he says. “But we like to do it properly.” Plenty of “umami-rich ingredients; anchovies and powdered porcini mushrooms” go in there too. Judges only taste one spoonful of each chilli so you’ve got to make sure it packs plenty of flavour.

When the pair went to Vegas, they had to adapt. “You get disqualified if you put beans in. They get classed as a foreign body.” Also Americans like it saltier. “Really, really salty. And they don’t use fresh vegetables either. No onions, no peppers.” The US scene is so well established and the prize money so high that a lot of effort is put into trying to beat the system. “We met people who were cooking in syndicates,” reveals Latham. “They all used the same recipe then split any winnings.”

The UK competition isn’t quite on that scale yet, but with people importing dried chillies from Mexico and consulting their butchers, I’m feeling quite nervous. My recipe involves beef shin, black beans, three kinds of dried peppers, a scotch bonnet and plenty of smoked paprika but I suspect I may need to up my game. Perhaps it’s time to bring in the komodo dragon?

Komodo Dragon review by Alexi Duggins

Komodo dragon from Tesco. Photograph: Tesco

What is it that people love so much about chillies? The warm glow in the tummy? The endorphins? The feeling that the rest of your life is going to be spent slowly, agonisingly expelling every single one of your internal organs?



The komodo dragon, at 1.4 million Scoville units, is almost identical to a chilli I’ve previously eaten: the naga viper chilli (1,382,000 Scoville units). A nice bit of chilli is a rollercoaster ride of a meal: exhilaration, endorphins, perhaps a little light whooping. But this? This is nothing like that. If this was a rollercoaster, the seats would be made of razor blades, it would fire you into a skip full of rusty fence poles and then send in a troupe of fluffy helpers to jump up and down on your unmentionables.

At first, everything seems normal. Then you realise that someone has lit a distress flare inside your skull. Your face begins going numb from the mouth upwards. As the sensation reaches your eyeballs, you start to cry. By the time the feeling reaches the top of your head, your ears are ringing. Your skull feels as if it’s being crushed by a vice. Your stomach convulses as it attempts to retch it back up. And this isn’t even the worst bit. That comes in the middle of the night, when you awake to find that your stomach acid has leapt into your chest and is sizzling away at your heart, while your colon is whipping around like a boxer’s skipping rope.

Pay no attention to comparisons to standard kitchen chillies. Ignore the fact that it’s 400 times hotter than a jalapeño. Put aside the fact that it’s four times hotter than a scotch bonnet. The comparison you really want to focus on? The fact that US-based police thinktank The Police Policy Studies Council claims that most pepper sprays used in the country vary between 500,000 and 2,000,000 Scoville units. At 1.4m units, the komodo dragon chilli isn’t a foodstuff, it’s a chemical weapon.

Thomasina Miers’ chillies for newbies

Turkish chilli flakes

They’re sun-dried and rubbed in oil and aren’t too spicy but have a naturally sweet umami flavour and are delicious on all sorts of things from eggs or yoghurt to cheese on toast and baked potatoes.

Cayenne

If you buy chilli powder, you don’t necessarily know what you’re getting. It could be very poor quality. I would always use cayenne.

Chipotles

For that smoky flavour, these are incredible.

Arbol or pepperoncino

These are great for crumbling into things to give a lovely dry heat.

Fresh chillies

Experiment to find your favourite, but they do go soggy in the fridge so if you’ve got some left over, chop them up and freeze them.

Dried chipotles. Photograph: Alamy

David Floyd’s top five UK chilli products

1) Oak Smoked Chipotle Chilli Sauce, Upton Cheney

This is unbelievably good. They grow and ripen the jalapeños until red and then smoke them on the farm.

2) Hari’s Lime & Green Chilli Pickle, Ouse Valley

This is an amazingly good chutney. I gave it to friends who were experts on international cuisine and they thought it was great too.

3) Who Dares Burns, Hot-Headz

It’s not the hottest one they produce, but it’s hotter than Dave’s Insanity Sauce, the first one to become famous as the “hottest sauce in the world”.

4) Smoky Jo’s Chipotle Chilli Sauce, The Chillees

A really nice one. Another chipotle one but a wonderful sauce.

5) Honeycomb Chilli Chocolate, South Devon Chilli Farm

Instead of another sauce, here’s a chocolate. Very good flavour.