A Chili and Hot Sauce Glossary: Essential Terms Every Beginner Should Know
From SHU to lacto-fermentation to pepper mash — this beginner-friendly glossary decodes the essential vocabulary of chili peppers and hot sauce making.
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Why Spicy Food Makes Your Nose Run and Eyes Water: The Capsaicin Effect
Eating spicy food triggers a real physiological alarm: capsaicin hijacks your body’s heat-sensing TRPV1 receptors, setting off a chain reaction that floods your nose and eyes.
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Heat Is Not Flavour: What Chili Peppers Really Taste Like
Discover why the burn of a chili pepper is a pain signal, not a flavour, and how this science unlocks a richer world of pepper tasting notes.
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Fresh vs Dried Chilis: How Heat and Flavour Really Change
From capsaicin concentration to Maillard reactions, discover the real chemistry behind why fresh and dried chilis taste — and burn — so differently.
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Pepper X: The Story Behind the World’s Hottest Chili Pepper
Pepper X holds the Guinness World Record as the hottest chili ever measured at 2,693,000 SHU. Discover how Ed Currie bred it over a decade of secretive crossbreeding.
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Are Spicy Foods Good for You? What Capsaicin Research Actually Shows
Capsaicin, the compound behind chili heat, is linked to lower mortality, better gut health, and FDA-approved pain relief — here is what the science actually shows.
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How to Build a Tolerance to Spicy Food, Safely: The Science of TRPV1 Desensitisation
The burning from a chilli is a neural illusion produced by one protein — TRPV1. Here’s how that receptor desensitises, and how to train it safely.
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Capsaicin vs Capsaicinoids: The Chemistry That Actually Makes Peppers Hot
Capsaicin gets all the blame for spicy heat, but it’s one member of a whole family of compounds. Here’s how the chemistry of capsaicinoids really works.
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Does Water Stress Really Make Chili Peppers Hotter? What the Science Says
Gardeners have long claimed that withholding water makes chili peppers hotter. Here’s what the peer-reviewed research on capsaicin biosynthesis actually shows.
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The Scoville Scale Explained: What the Numbers Really Mean About Pepper Heat
From jalapeños to Pepper X, discover how Scoville Heat Units are measured, what capsaicin does in your body, and what those SHU numbers really tell you.
