How hot is your chilli pepper? At last, Chongqing has an answer
How hot is hot? Budding cooks who dither about how many chilli peppers to add to a spicy dish may soon have help at hand - thanks to the mainland's most-famous producer of the tongue-scorching crop.
Chongqing is testing a new system that grades its Shizhu peppers according to a 10-point scale of spiciness, Xinhua reported.
Developed by Southwest University, in collaboration with 'other units', the heat scale is being evaluated by experts from the Chongqing Science and Technology Commission following a pilot scheme, which the state news agency said was the country's first attempt to produce a scientific rating for fiery flavours.
It ranks all 14 varieties of Shizhu pepper - named after Shizhu county, in the east of the municipality, where they are grown - on a scale of one to 10, and divides them into four categories; 'mild', 'medium', 'highly spicy' and 'exceedingly spicy'.
Professor Kan Jianquan, who led the research at Southwest University's food science department, said the investigation had found Shizhu's famous scarlet peppers - known as 'chaotian red' - to be among the spiciest grown in the key pepper-producing regions, which include Guizhou, Hainan, Henan and Hunan provinces and Chongqing municipality itself.
The chaotian red had been given the scale's top ranking of 10, Kan said, the same ranking given to Hainan's 'emperor pepper' and the 'ghost chilli' grown in India.
The mainland is far and away the world's biggest pepper-grower. In 2007, its 14 million-tonne fresh pepper crop accounted for 53 per cent of world production, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation.
That was an increase of 7.7 per cent on the preceding year and just under double the harvest a decade earlier.
Shizhu county is one of the mainland's top five pepper growing areas. In 2008, its pepper fields covered just under 17,000 hectares of land, almost 40 per cent more than in 2007.
Hot stuff
The mainland is by far the biggest producer of chilli peppers worldwide
53 per cent of peppers are grown there, with pepper crops accounting for this many tonnes: 14m
