Scoville Units: Chiles
I’m having a hard time getting this lesson to click. Here’s the graphic that the idea came from:
- Stolen from Penzey’s spices, but they totally wanted me to. Click to embiggen.
I know there’s something good here. Something with the size of the peppers and the number of Scoville units, but I can’t quite find the right approach for using it in class. Here are a few options:
- Line all the whole peppers up by size and white out some of the Scoville ratings? Develop a predictive model?
- Make a movie of me eating each pepper. Overlay the Scoville units, pause the movie just as I put a Piquin pepper in my mouth without showing the 140,000 answer?
- Predict how many drinks of milk it will take for me to stop crying based on the Scoville units? I’m lactose intolerant; double funny!
Help! Comment it up, folks.
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16 thoughts on “Scoville Units: Chiles”
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[...] then I wondered what if we all did this? What if the next time Shawn creates a kick ass lesson on using chili peppers, he also put out press release? What if Kate wrote a press release to describe how she’s [...]
It definitely looks like you can use this in your bio curriculum as well. Make has a whole section dedicated to plant hacking. Here’s more from their blog: Chili Pepper Arms Race Heating Up
I wonder why the Scoville scale isn’t logarithmic…
But, to answer your question, I think video would neglect potentially the most potent part of the lesson. Maybe don’t mention Scoville units at all initially, but challenge the students to figure out conversion rates between some peppers (i.e. how many small cubes of banana pepper to “equal” the spiciness of one small cube of jalepeno, etc.)
DIING DING DING DING
We have a winner. This is exactly what I’m going to do. Thank You!
Also, this is a deviation from the “Let’s put them all on one scale” idea of Scoville units, but I’ve heard different people tend to respond differently to different kinds of peppers/spiciness, at least at the level of different cuisines. So you might not get perceptual agreement even about which of two peppers is hotter.
Real Peppers. In class. I don’t know what you need to do with them, but the 1 AM fairies tell me it should probably involve real peppers and kids freaking the fuck out about it at some point.
Gilbert: Perhaps this could turn into a genetics unit involving taste? Also, I think you should always comment at 1 AM.
Is making salsa too much of an in this idea…I dont give a rip about scoville rating until I have to cook with the chili. Making different salsa with say 3 of each chili and then comparing and then looking at a chart would be pretty bad ass but probably way to difficult for classrooms.
Ultimately how are you going to field the “why” questions about hotness.
It would be sweet for you to grow three different jalipeno plants each with way different levels of water consumption. the most stressed plant will yield the chili with the least flesh and hottest seeds/veins…even though they are all jalipeno.
when i have my kids look at the chart most of the time my white kids think the biggest ones are the hottest…or at least the jalipenos are bc taco bell told them so.
fun fact: Chipotle is just a smoked and dried up jalipeno…Ancho is a dried up Pisilla pepper…why does drying drop the hotness?
You might need to do more research for this, but is there some correlation between color and Scoville units? I remember hearing that green are mildest, red are hotter, and orange (habanero and scotch bonnets) are hottest? I’ve never had a scotch bonnet, but I grew habaneros three summers ago and my taste buds are only now getting back to normal.
That wouldn’t directly correlate on the spectrum (not like you’d get a direct variation between, say, frequency of light and Scovilles) but there might be something there you can use.
Just give it to the students as a provocation to get them thinking. Have them think about it through one of the thinking routines from Project Zero eg See Think Wonder. http://www.pz.harvard.edu/vt/visibleThinking_html_files/03_ThinkingRoutines/03c_Core_routines/SeeThinkWonder/SeeThinkWonder_Routine.html
Their natural curiosity will tell you where to go next… or they can go off on their own inquiries.
Why not all three ideas?
What about trying to find correlations between Scoville units and usage between cultures, countries, ethnic groups? Probably no Piquin at Taco John’s. Are the chilies used for other things besides cooking? Are there medicinal applications? Horticultural? (and if so, does level of Scoville unit impact that usage?)
There is probably scholarly research available on some of this and if not, scouring the literature for connections would be enlightening and fun!
there was a great christmas lecture about plants and animals (the 300 million yr war) if this works in the US the first episode has a guy eating the hottest chilli in the world.
http://ri.mediaondemand.net/handler.aspx?SiteID=1&UserID=13570&EventID=1762
(or maybe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Iei1GYx1K4)
he looks as if he’s about to die
shame RI is stuck in 20th century copyright thinking
If it takes one Piquin to make you pass out in a pile of your own vomit, how many Anchos can you get down before you lose consciousness?
I’d take option 1. Bring in some chiles, cut them into small squares, have kids try a few from across the range, then try to place a Habanero on the scale by taste. The guesses will probably be all over the place. Then break out the chart, create the model, and use the size of the Habanero to predict Scoville units. Follow up with its actual rating.
Shawn,
This isn’t fully relevant, but since you mentioned you’ll be teaching bio next year, I thought I’d pass along this great tidbit from the Scott Freeman’s Biology text (which you should steal—it’s awesome). It turns out that birds are immune to capsicum, and so they feel no ill effects from eating even the hottest peppers. It also turns out that their digestive systems don’t digest the seeds, and therefore, birds are very effective at spreading the seeds of the chili peppers. Other animals, however, aren’t so nice—they often destroy the seeds in digestion, and it’s thought peppers evolved higher capsicum levels in order to protect themselves. I’m probably mangling a few details here, but it’s a very fascinating experiment discussed in the fist chapter of freeman’s text.
Also, from looking at wikipedia, looks like you might actually be able to do the original scoville test, by diluting extracts from peppers until tasters can no longer detect the “heat” of the pepper. There could be some fun mathematics there.