It is also important to note that Carolina Reaper peppers are visibly noticeable thanks to their scorpion-like tail and bright red coloring. Although, with that much heat, it is probably enough! However, we can’t be sure what Ed’s got cooking up in the garden these days and there very well could be something even hotter on the plant as we speak. It is a crossbreed of the Pakistani Naga and the West Indies Red Habanero pepper.Ĭurrently, there’s only one variety of the Carolina Reaper. The Carolina Reaper is a specially cultivated pepper bred in 2013 by a South Carolina chili enthusiast named Ed Currie. While it is still one of the hottest peppers on the planet, the ghost pepper only held the Guinness World Record title from 2007 to 2010.Caronlina What is a Carolina Reaper? There are multiple varieties of the ghost pepper, ranging from the standard red to the chocolate, orange, peach, and purple. It is native to Northeastern India, Bangladesh, and occasional sections of Sri Lanka and has been around for centuries. The real name for the ghost pepper is bhut jolokia, which loosely translates in the Assam language to ghost. Ready to get started? Let’s look at the ghost pepper versus the Carolina Reaper to explore the similarities and differences. However, they’re not the same thing.Īs your favorite gourmet hot sauce brand, we decided that our team of experts at Ghost Scream would take this opportunity to compare the two and decide if there’s really a clear winner.Īnd-while we’re obviously quite partial to the ghost peppers that we use in our specialty hot sauce-we promise to be as impartial as we can throughout the whole process. How accurate is this article? We are striving to become the ultimate resource for information on peppers, and if you notice any inaccuracies, or want to contribute content, please contact us.They’re known as two of the world's hottest peppers: the ghost pepper and the Carolina Reaper. And now, in 2013, a majority of Americans are saying they prefer hot or spicy foods. Red Robin has even introduced a new line of sandwiches and burgers dressed with habanero sauce, called island fire, in addition to their burger that features a scorching ghost pepper sauce. Ketchup is also getting hotter with the release of Heinz’s Hot & Spicy Ketchup. As for Sriracha hot chili sauce, the brand sold over 20 million bottles just last year. Spicy food is also appearing almost 15% more on menus from 2010. While that may not sound like something people would want to put anywhere near their mouths, taste buds apparently can’t get enough as the super hot pepper business continues to get even hotter which has now become one of America’s fastest=growing industries. Currie’s Carolina Reaper chili pepper has even showed to have similar chemical composition to pepper spray. Since the growth of his business, he has trademarked his brand “Smoking Ed’s Carolina Reaper.” which gives him the sole right to phrase that on his sales of peppers and seeds. “I pretty much work on peppers all the time, when I look at my children, I see peppers.” Currie has stated.

This year alone, Currie will harvest around 17 million Carolina Reaper peppers right on his own land in South Carolina and could stand to make as much as $1 million from selling the pepper seeds and making paste out of the peppers that he then sells to hot sauce companies. The proof came from tests conducted at Winthrop’s lab which tested how hot the pepper is. Ed Currie paid $12,000 in order to obtain the information he needed to supply Guinness with to claim the record. The Carolina Reaper was deemed as the world’s hottest chili pepper in 2012 by the Guinness World Records, surpassing the previous record holder the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. It has a number of culinary uses with sauces, seeds, and peppers being fairly easy to come by. The Carolina Reaper, which is a hybrid chili pepper, is apart of the Capsicum chinense species having originally been called “HP22B” by it’s creator Ed Currie, owner and runner of the PuckerButt Pepper Company which is located in Fort Mill, South Carolina. In other words, it’s a pepper that’s a 100 times hotter than a Jalapeno. The Carolina Reaper, now famously known as the world’s hottest chili pepper, averages 1,569,300 SHU on the Scoville Scale with levels that even peak over 2,200,000 SHU.

Ghost pepper vs carolina reaper