Sean has openly stated on Hot Ones episodes, multiple times, that the sauces do not increase in intensity but rather they pace them out for some peaks and valleys. He calls it a "symphony". Here's...
Sean has openly stated on Hot Ones episodes, multiple times, that the sauces do not increase in intensity but rather they pace them out for some peaks and valleys. He calls it a "symphony". Here's a moment from the one with Pedro Pascal where Sean states that the sauce is a shift down from the previous one. Another from Cate Blanchette realizing the current sauce was less spicy than the previous one and Sean acknowledging it and calling it their symphony. The big one is Elijah Wood, who I think was the first to bring attention to it and get the whole explanation out of Sean. I feel like there have been a lot more examples in the past few years but these I found from a collection of transcripts that go until 2022.
I have a love of hot sauces, I always have about six bottles on the go. I've had Da Bomb before, back in 2002. Some vendor in a mall was having a good time telling people they should try it. My cousin ordered 3 lbs. of wings with Da Bomb sauce without tasting it. It is still, to this day, the single spiciest thing I have ever experienced. Guests aren't exaggerating when they say it tastes terrible, it is supposed to be artificial, awful hot sauce that is just insanely spicy. It's supposed to taste like you're drinking Hollywood movie face-melting acid, I suppose.
I don't think I have ever paid attention to Scoville units because it always seemed arbitrary to me. Some sauces would claim they were in the hundreds of thousands and be no hotter than Sriracha. Others would mention a couple of thousand and then blow my socks off. I've been watching Hot Ones for years now and am only just realizing that I could not tell you the Scoville rating of any of the sauces on the show, I always just glossed over it. I'm not particularly surprised the numbers for them are manipulated to give the illusion but it is more than a little odd when the host and guest openly will say otherwise during the interviews.
I don't know anyone who actually paid attention to Scoville units anyway. It kind of strikes me the same as how people assume single-malt whiskey must mean it's the best: something that sounds plausible to a layperson but quickly falls apart under any scrutiny, and not something adhered to be any enthusiast.
I'm glad that Sean is cool with adressing it, it seems fair enough that they wouldn't want to completely wreck their guest just before the promo spot. Hot Ones is barely about the hot-sauce anyway...
I'm glad that Sean is cool with adressing it, it seems fair enough that they wouldn't want to completely wreck their guest just before the promo spot. Hot Ones is barely about the hot-sauce anyway at this point, the main draw for me is how good Sean and his writers are at doing interviews.
I don't really think any of this is really a valid argument. They have the number and a graphic on screen that is at best incredibly misleading as to how spicy the sauces are. Per the video, some...
I don't really think any of this is really a valid argument. They have the number and a graphic on screen that is at best incredibly misleading as to how spicy the sauces are. Per the video, some of them are like 10 times milder than the show would have you think.
I don't really know anything about scoville units except that the higher the number, the spicier the sauce. So when the number keeps increasing on screen, I obviously took it at face value that they get stronger.
They are outright lying to their audience about their sauces and I don't see how that is in any way defensible.
I feel like you're taking this a little too seriously. It's not that big of a deal. The hot sauce is just framing for an interview. The interview is what people care about. I think they just...
I feel like you're taking this a little too seriously. It's not that big of a deal. The hot sauce is just framing for an interview. The interview is what people care about.
I think they just bought hot sauces with ascending scoville units when they set the show up, and it turns out it's not all that accurate, but it never mattered that much, so no point in changing things.
If the hot sauce is just a framing for an interview, then remove the Scoville Value from the sauces altogether. Call them "hot", "superhot", "extreme hot", "bazinga hot". Whatever you want. The...
If the hot sauce is just a framing for an interview, then remove the Scoville Value from the sauces altogether. Call them "hot", "superhot", "extreme hot", "bazinga hot". Whatever you want. The "Scoville Value" makes the whole thing seem way more precise than it really is. It's misleading. If they called it "Unicorn Scale" that is measured in 100 Horn Degrees, people would believe it all the same.
Subway used to advertise 30cm sandwiches. Someone went to Subway with a ruler and measured it. It was much less. There were two solutions to that problem: (1) they could make their sandwiches 30cm, or (2) they could stop advertising their sandwiches in centimeters.
If precision is not the point, remove any pretense of precision.
Yes, there is really no reason for them to use an objective measurement other than to be misleading. Testing the sauces would be easily affordable for them, especially because they would only need...
Yes, there is really no reason for them to use an objective measurement other than to be misleading. Testing the sauces would be easily affordable for them, especially because they would only need to do it once per season, and be able to skip the duplicates.
Like they mentioned in the video, this has also potential of being dangerous as viewers could be mislead into thinking they can handle a 2+M scoville sauce, only to have a rough awakening when they try the real deal.
However, I also think there has to be something done from a regulation perspective. There seem to be two different measurement bases in use (dry and wet). But there is no visible distinction for the consumer which in of itself is already risky.
Scoville units are not an objective measurement under any circumstances. They are and have always been an attempt to numerically express subjective human experiences on a scale that can be easily...
Yes, there is really no reason for them to use an objective measurement other than to be misleading
Scoville units are not an objective measurement under any circumstances. They are and have always been an attempt to numerically express subjective human experiences on a scale that can be easily compared. This is in contrast to something like measuring the actual quantities of various capsaicinoids in a hot sauce, which would be an objective measurement. Scoville units are usually tied to capsaicinoid content, but there are so many other factors that affect our perception of spiciness that you can't treat one as the proxy for the other. And no matter how you determine the Scoville rating of something, it will never be an objective measurement, because it's fundamentally just a systematized way of ranking a subjective qualia.
That doesn't necessarily mean they weren't being misleading with the Scoville ratings they chose to display, but I think it's important to distinguish between what an objective and subjective measurement is here when you start talking about things like medical risk and liability, as these are outside the bounds of what a Scoville unit could remotely communicate to a reasonable consumer. If you have a medical condition that could cause complications with very spicy food, you cannot rely on Scoville units to determine whether something is safe for you no matter how they are measured and how accurate they are. They just don't directly reflect any objective features of the food in that way.
Hot sauce advertising also doesn't have a great track record when it comes to the reliability of stuff like Scoville units in its marketing. This complicates the idea of finding "the real deal," as it were. I wouldn't necessarily be against regulating things like this to require accurate reporting based on consistent standards (though I'm still not sure Scoville units would be the best choice for what measurements to report), but as it stands there is no such regulation and Scoville units are used widely in advertising in ways that almost certainly are no more accurate than what's done on this show. This definitely colors what a reasonable person can be expected to conclude when seeing Scoville units in advertising a hot sauce (often much more prominently than is done on Hot Ones).
I don't see how scoville ratings aren't an objective measurement? Anyone with the equipment could repeat these tests and arrive at the same ballpark numbers. While one's subjective experience may...
I don't see how scoville ratings aren't an objective measurement? Anyone with the equipment could repeat these tests and arrive at the same ballpark numbers. While one's subjective experience may not perfectly align with the rating, it sets reasonable expectations. It's similar to temperature measurements, they alone don't tell the whole story of how hot a day feels, but it provides usable expectations.
I don't watch Hot Ones and can't really tolerate heat well, so I'm watching this discussion from hopefully a fairly neutral position and: The same objectively inconsistent numbers that don't tell...
I don't watch Hot Ones and can't really tolerate heat well, so I'm watching this discussion from hopefully a fairly neutral position and:
I don't see how scoville ratings aren't an objective measurement? Anyone with the equipment could repeat these tests and arrive at the same ballpark numbers.
The same objectively inconsistent numbers that don't tell a very good story?
While one's subjective experience may not perfectly align with the rating, it sets reasonable expectations.
The problem is Hot Ones hasn't tested the sauces and neither the manufacturers (excl. maybe Da Bomb), so it's not even clear where they got their numbers from in the first place.
The problem is Hot Ones hasn't tested the sauces and neither the manufacturers (excl. maybe Da Bomb), so it's not even clear where they got their numbers from in the first place.
In Hot Ones case, my understanding is that they're just using the Scoville rating of the relevant chili pepper used to make the given hot sauce. But I haven't actually checked this myself, that's...
In Hot Ones case, my understanding is that they're just using the Scoville rating of the relevant chili pepper used to make the given hot sauce. But I haven't actually checked this myself, that's just what others here seem to be noticing.
I think you're mistaking me saying that Scoville units are subjective with me saying they can't be measured at all, which I'm not doing. My point is that Scoville units are fundamentally designed...
I think you're mistaking me saying that Scoville units are subjective with me saying they can't be measured at all, which I'm not doing. My point is that Scoville units are fundamentally designed to measure something subjective -- "spiciness" is a subjective experience, while "capsaicinoid quantity" is something that can be objectively measured. Obviously these things have a relationship, but because there are a huge number of factors other than capsaicinoid quantity that influence human experience of spiciness, the relationship is complicated.
Scoville units originally used a human tasting panel to reach their measurements. While this is the closest to directly measuring the experience of spiciness you can really get, it's got plenty of obvious flaws. So in the modern day, labs use high-performance liquid chromatography to measure quantity of capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin present and calculate the sample's "heat" based on the proportion of those compounds compared to the total mass (traditionally dried pepper mass). This solution is trying to extrapolate the subjective experience Scoville units are intended to represent from objective things that can be directly measured. There are already some issues here -- typically only the two most common capsaicinoids are taken into account, ignoring other spicy compounds. Traditionally this is done with dried peppers and ignored water content, which can cause inconsistencies even when just applying these methods to chili peppers themselves. But ultimately this is probably still a decent approximation when applied to peppers specifically. It's important to recognize that it is an approximation, though -- there is no way to directly measure what Scoville units actually represent.
But there are some pretty huge problems with applying a method like this to a food product made with other ingredients as well as chilis, like hot sauce. Even if we assume water content is dealt with somehow, there are plenty of ingredients that can have pretty drastically different effects on the human experience of spiciness. Acids and fats interact with capsaicinoids in ways that we know have effects like these -- this is why people recommend drinking milk when eating spicy food. The same thai curry recipe will have a very different spice level if you substitute coconut milk for an equivalent quantity of water. These interactions are complex enough that I don't even think it's possible to adapt the existing formula made for dried chili to rigorously account for the effects of other ingredients. The result is that while you can apply the same technique to get a value that is even quite consistent when taken more than once, it's much harder to claim that this actually approximates the thing that Scoville units are intended to measure. There's just so many variables that we know have some impact that just straight-up aren't being taken into account.
I still don't agree about it not being lying. Different batches, sure. The manufacturers could at least test a bunch of different batches then, average the numbers out, and put that number on the...
I still don't agree about it not being lying. Different batches, sure. The manufacturers could at least test
a bunch of different batches then, average the numbers out, and put that number on the label.
Also, I belive Hot Ones' company is worth $80M. They can afford $60 tests. But the near 3 million Scoville number is more impressive (and there is no way that they don't get a lot of sales off of just that number alone)
Putting those numbers on screen on the videos is advertising. But sure, maybe the margins of earnings from that part is less than what they earn from their media.
And nowhere that I can find does Heatonist advertise the sauce as being 3 mil Scoville units. They don't advertise Scoville units for any sauces they sell, AFAICT. Pepper X is rated at 2.69 mil, which is where the number comes from, but that's the same way they get every sauce's rating on the show; Look up the pepper's rating, show it on screen. It's as simple as that.
Putting those numbers on screen on the videos is advertising. But sure, maybe the margins of earnings from that part is less than what they earn from their media.
Or make your sauce in such large batches that the natural variation in spiciness from one pepper to the next becomes meaningless. This is why sauces from mega brands like Tabasco and Sriracha are...
The only way to avoid such inconsistencies is to use pure capsaicin oil (AKA pepper extract) in each batch
Or make your sauce in such large batches that the natural variation in spiciness from one pepper to the next becomes meaningless. This is why sauces from mega brands like Tabasco and Sriracha are very consistent.
Dude, chill. They have the sauces arranged so there are some spicy but pleasant ones up top so the guest builds some confidence, then they destroy them with battery acid so everyone can see how...
Dude, chill. They have the sauces arranged so there are some spicy but pleasant ones up top so the guest builds some confidence, then they destroy them with battery acid so everyone can see how they cope, then they taper off with moderately spicy ones so they aren't gibbering messes when they do the promo. The PR wonks are happy because the plugs get done, the guest and host are happy because they got some good questions in, and the viewers are happy because we got to see a famous person eat industrial spice additive and lose their shit.
I feel like you're getting hung up on set dressing.
I'm pretty sure there was too many different things I said there for my lack of care about how they represent Scoville units to make everything I said "invalid". I certainly wasn't excusing the...
I'm pretty sure there was too many different things I said there for my lack of care about how they represent Scoville units to make everything I said "invalid". I certainly wasn't excusing the discrepancy, I called it "more than a little odd".
All I said was that I view Scoville units like the points in Whose Line, and that nobody in the know seems to pay them any attention since they never really matched up with the heat of the sauces. This is because, for the longest time, Scoville ratings were derived from subjective tasting panels, not a lab test. Many hot sauce competitions still use that method to this day. This isn't like lying about a SI or regulated measurement like calories or weight in a food package. Scoville ratings have always been more of a marketing gimmick. After all, many of the sauces advertise different numbers than they would be rated with the lab method.
The Scoville numbers in a graphic I just realized I have never paid attention to will continue to be of zero import to me. Absolute none of my interest in Hot Ones, hot sauces, or their overall product involves the accuracy of the Scoville units in that graphic.
I suppose there's also the question of how much of a lie it is if the graphics say one thing but the host and guest say another directly in the show but considering that I, a regular viewer, was already aware that the sauces don't ramp up because I paid attention to the show, I can't say I feel lied to.
For me to be incensed about misleading Scoville units on their transition graphics, I would need to forget a lifetime experience with Scoville units on hot sauces, and what I have heard them say on the show multiple times.
I read your whole comment as defending Hot Ones I suppose. I really don't agree that that the points don't matter. It very much does. They use the high numbers to market themselves on being the...
to make everything I said "invalid"
I read your whole comment as defending Hot Ones I suppose.
I really don't agree that that the points don't matter. It very much does. They use the high numbers to market themselves on being the spiciest. Meaning the most extreme, the biggest, the best.
After all, many of the sauces advertise different numbers than they would be rated with the lab method.
Yes, and that is a big problem too! How is that not misleading and false advertising?
That you don't care about the numbers is no biggie. We can disagree about that and that's fine. If they directly say that the number is not correct then I have missed that. Talking about it in this harmony/symphony way is much different and is not an admittance that the numbers are correct - and those numbers are practically front and center on the screen so not sure how the audience, generally, is supposed to not care about that.
Because it's not really consequential to the show, nor the product, and they are using a real basis to derive the numbers (using the Scoville rating of the peppers that go into the sauce) even if...
Because it's not really consequential to the show, nor the product, and they are using a real basis to derive the numbers (using the Scoville rating of the peppers that go into the sauce) even if the methodology makes it rather inaccurate to final taste (i.e. not rating the final product in a lab). People watch Hot Ones for the interview and how hot sauces act like a truth serum, not for the integrity spice ramp that would create a more torturous scenario. They're advertising hot sauces in general and it's good marketing for all these sauces but it's not all centred around the integrity of if the spiciness really is ramping up. Even when Hot Ones sell their season packs of hot sauces, they do not actually include the version of Da Bomb they use on the show.
And the end result of taste can contradict the Scoville ratings—many people find Da Bomb tastes spicier than other ones that are rated higher. And some guests on the show actually find the Last Dab to be spicier than Da Bomb, which goes against the lab-tested ratings in this video. Spiciness is very subjective, even NIST acknowledges that the lab-rated methods of deriving Scoville ratings still results in something subjective. It's just not something that can be objectively measured and regulated like weights and nutritional content.
I once had a whole season of Hot Ones sauces at my disposal (except with the alternate version of Da Bomb) and honestly, I found them all to be fairly mild in the end. I've had spicier habanero sauces at Mexican restaurants. But other people had a very different response to them. It really is very subjective and there's no real way to know for sure without trying it yourself.
This is why I likened Scoville ratings to the notion about single-malt whiskeys. There's a lot of whiskeys out there that market themselves as high quality because they are single-malt but that's largely bunk because that doesn't determine the quality of the final product. It's impossible to regulate and score the quality of a whiskey in (compared to the alcohol content, for example). I recently had one that advertised itself as "Exceptionally smooth" and yet it was the single roughest whiskey I've ever tasted in my life. I could call that false advertising but how would I really prove that? There are reviews from people online who say it's super smooth to them. There's no objective or reliable way to measure smoothness like this. Similarly, it's basically impossible to know exactly how hot you will find a hot sauce by Scoville rating until you try it yourself. It's a decent guideline when done right but depending on a bunch of factors, you could still find yourself wondering how it got that score after tasting it.
Like I said elsewhere just now, there is no way that the number isn't consequential to the show/product because they 100% are earning more money simply by having an impressive number on it. It is...
Like I said elsewhere just now, there is no way that the number isn't consequential to the show/product because they 100% are earning more money simply by having an impressive number on it. It is the opposite of integrity.
And some guests on the show actually find the Last Dab to be spicier than Da Bomb, which goes against the lab-tested ratings in this video.
Placebo can be very powerful.
The rating is of course subjective but the number isn't. I never eat spicy stuff so even their mildest sauce would likely be super uncomfortable for me - so therefore my level is at most 1460, right? Your level is a lot higher of course if you found all of them fairly mild. But for us both it is a guide that we should be able to rely on.
I'd love to hear a detailed explanation how the show is directly earning more money from these Scoville units. Use me as your example, since I've already explained how I've engaged and...
I'd love to hear a detailed explanation how the show is directly earning more money from these Scoville units. Use me as your example, since I've already explained how I've engaged and participated with the show. How have I directly contributed to their money via those Scoville ratings?
Some people finding the Last Dab hotter is not a placebo. Again, NIST has described Scoville ratings as subjective with the peppers and there are many factors that go into how hot the final hot sauce product feels. Some people are more sensitive to the formulation of that sauce than others. People more accustomed to spicy foods and Scoville units acknowledge this. What basis do you have to dismiss this as placebo?
The number is the rating. Those are not two separate things. A personal max number is not how it works (especially one so low). When it comes to hot sauce, it's a loose approximation of the spiciness of the sauce at best. If you watch the show, you will see plenty of guests say they never eat spicy stuff and then find that they can handle most of the sauces just fine. Again, there are many factors that go into how spicy a hot sauce ends up feeling. A Scoville rating is just the start of the story, not the end summation.
For what it's worth, the bottles themselves don't appear to have the Scoville units. When I saw the bottles in the store today, I only noticed a 1-to-10 spiciness scale.
For what it's worth, the bottles themselves don't appear to have the Scoville units. When I saw the bottles in the store today, I only noticed a 1-to-10 spiciness scale.
Scovilles are definitely iffy when you get down to specifics. As a very "big picture" / zoomed out idea of how hot things are, they can be a decent guide, but only to a point. There are so many...
Scovilles are definitely iffy when you get down to specifics. As a very "big picture" / zoomed out idea of how hot things are, they can be a decent guide, but only to a point. There are so many other facets to spicy things. Even just where and how they burn and how the body reacts to them. It can be "easier" to handle some spicier stuff, if it burns in a way you mind less (or if the heat is super hot but doesn't stick around for a long time, etc)
So I'm biased, because I do rather like Hot Ones. I've seen a few dozen episodes. And I'll be honest, this feels like a video that's trying to manufacture drama for clicks. They try to assign...
So I'm biased, because I do rather like Hot Ones. I've seen a few dozen episodes. And I'll be honest, this feels like a video that's trying to manufacture drama for clicks. They try to assign medical liability to an entertainment show, they dangle info but tell you it's only available on their Patreon, and they contradict their own reporting without explanation. They have an interview with Smokin' Ed Currie, the guy who bred Pepper X, who says that he doesn't assign a Scoville rating to his sauces and that Hot Ones is assigning it based on the pepper that goes into it. But earlier in the video, they showed footage of Ed telling Hot Ones the Scoville rating for the sauce he'd developed for them from Pepper X, and in that footage he gives a rating for the sauce and a different rating for the pepper.
I'm willing to believe the actual Scoville ratings are as wildly different from the reported ratings as the video says. And no, I don't think it's a good look for the show. But while I think it's reasonable to point it out and expect the show to engage in honesty, it feels like anyone getting outraged over it hasn't actually watched the show. When they put the hot sauces on screen with the rating graphic beside them, it's really just a brief bumper to break up the different portions of the interview. It's not the focus of the show at all.
While I knew The Last Dab was a sauce made specifically for the show, I had never heard of Pepper X before this video, nor that the sauce was the exclusive way to taste that pepper. They don't mention it on the show and they don't aggressively market the sauce or any of the others. The show is all about the unusual interview format that humanizes the interviewee. They ask questions that are actually interesting, or just cheeky and lighthearted, or a deep cut into their past that they're surprised to be asked about... rather than talking the whole time about whatever their latest promotion is. It's the only kind of celebrity interview that I think is actually worth watching. And when they do chat about the sauces, it's often a theme that the expectations are different from reality, or that the taste is more important than just the pure heat level. (That latter is something which I understand is a common thought among hot sauce aficionados; I'm not a fan of spicy food at all, but I'm close to someone who likes the hot sauce scene.)
While I do agree that the scoville ratings are misleading, one thing to keep in mind is that: Scoville tests are known to be highly approximate and A higher scoville rating doesn't necessarily...
While I do agree that the scoville ratings are misleading, one thing to keep in mind is that:
Scoville tests are known to be highly approximate
and
A higher scoville rating doesn't necessarily mean it will immediately affect a persons mouth the same way
With regards to #2, sauces made with extract tend to take full effect immediately, and usually subside more quickly. the sauces that are "all pepper" take a little time to build up (which won't happen with the one bite per sauce on Hot Ones).
I've eaten pretty much all of these sauces and more and also grow my own super hots to make my own sauces, so I can also confirm what a lot of others on here are saying with wide heat variances per pepper and per sauce batch. I can also confirm that Da Bomb tastes like battery acid, so don't waste your money unless you want the novelty.
Da Bomb was designed to quickly and easily elevate the spiciness of a large amount of chili. There's a video of that and the creator says they're happy for the exposure but Da Bomb is not supposed...
Da Bomb was designed to quickly and easily elevate the spiciness of a large amount of chili. There's a video of that and the creator says they're happy for the exposure but Da Bomb is not supposed to be used like that.
The creator can say that all he wants, but the fact is that the sauce itself makes no claim of this and it is labeled as a "hot sauce", not a food additive. Even if this dubious claim were true,...
The creator can say that all he wants, but the fact is that the sauce itself makes no claim of this and it is labeled as a "hot sauce", not a food additive. Even if this dubious claim were true, Da Bomb is a vile tasting sauce and I believe adding it to chili would simply ruin said chili. Adding a single super hot pepper to a large pot of chili will likely do the trick for most people.
Very interesting. I'm not surprised about Da Bomb, but I'm baffled about the early sauces, especially the two Hot Ones brand sauces (1 and 4) being in the wrong order - why? They could simply swap...
Very interesting. I'm not surprised about Da Bomb, but I'm baffled about the early sauces, especially the two Hot Ones brand sauces (1 and 4) being in the wrong order - why? They could simply swap them around and they would still be in the reserved slots.
Those Scoville levels are from a single test per sauce, and from the video it sounds like the sauce makers themselves don't test their product. There could be a lot of variation between different...
Those Scoville levels are from a single test per sauce, and from the video it sounds like the sauce makers themselves don't test their product.
There could be a lot of variation between different batches of sauces, especially across different seasons.
Not to mention the logistics for the show saying, "Hey. These Scoville numbers have been inaccurate for 10 years so we're going to re-order everything from now on." Which would either require dethroning the last dab or making the last dab with "non-natural" ingredients by adding in capsaicin extract. And at the end of the day, Hot Ones is really more about the interviews than the sauces. It probably makes a better interview for the guest to peak on spice level before the end, as opposed to right at the end when they typically do outros and pitch their current work.
The difference between the states number for the last one compared to this channel's test though is an order of magnitude. That's inexcusable in my opinion. It's misleading and false advertising -...
There could be a lot of variation between different batches of sauces
The difference between the states number for the last one compared to this channel's test though is an order of magnitude. That's inexcusable in my opinion. It's misleading and false advertising - and that's putting it mildly.
Personally, I don't care, I'm asking your thoughts. But if the sauce manufacturer says "ONE MILLION SCOVILLES" is the show supposed to test every bottle - which as noted is like questionable as a...
Personally, I don't care, I'm asking your thoughts. But if the sauce manufacturer says "ONE MILLION SCOVILLES" is the show supposed to test every bottle - which as noted is like questionable as a measurement - to confirm before they use the manufacturer's claims?
Everyone's perception of spice is so unique, and the same pepper can have massively different amounts of heat depending on a variety of factors, plus everyone wants to have a stupid high Scoville rating for some reason, this doesn't surprise me, but if there is responsibility, it'd be on the people making it, in my mind.
Edit: You answered similar replies elsewhere so don't feel pressed to respond. I just didn't see them.
I suppose you're right it's on the manufacturer to test it when it comes to the sauces on the show that are not their own. But they're the ones making multiple of the sauces so when their name is...
I suppose you're right it's on the manufacturer to test it when it comes to the sauces on the show that are not their own. But they're the ones making multiple of the sauces so when their name is on it, it's their responsibility.
I would liken it to the Honey scandal. They should at least, like MKBHD, address it - Honey was an outright scam though which I wouldn't go so far as to call this, but the Youtubers having them as sponsor still took responsibility and dropped them. So in my opinion Hot Ones should address this video and adjust the numbers in their videos.
I don't follow the show, and I think high scoville numbers along with "challenges" to eat the hottest thing are just plain stupid so I'm very much not the target audience. If they're making the...
I don't follow the show, and I think high scoville numbers along with "challenges" to eat the hottest thing are just plain stupid so I'm very much not the target audience. If they're making the sauces they should be held as accountable as anyone else - but as far as I can tell there's basically no regulation around scoville numbers or whatever (or why else would someone sell chips that could kill children in gas stations) so tbh it's more of a failing of our regulation.
I like the few interviews I've seen clips of but the "haha they're eating hot stuff and are uncomfortable" has never been any of the appeal. Honey literally took money away from people it was contracted with. These guys have used the same level of scoville marketing as every hot sauce. I don't think they're the same, but I'm coming from the outside, so I don't really have a horse in this fight.
Honestly, this makes me want to look at the sauces I’ve picked up over the years in my cabinet. Most are great, and I can tolerate some hot stuff imo, but there are a few that I definitely regret...
Honestly, this makes me want to look at the sauces I’ve picked up over the years in my cabinet. Most are great, and I can tolerate some hot stuff imo, but there are a few that I definitely regret purchasing. Those are the ones that literally hurt as they’re going through my system and not just a “hot” flavor in the mouth or throat. Moreso pain in the stomach or intestine. I don’t suffer from heartburn from any other foods either so whatever is in them is nuts.
I know someone else mentioned that extract based sauces hits different, maybe those regret sauces you have are made differently. It's not my bag, I like flavor but not heat for the sake of heat....
I know someone else mentioned that extract based sauces hits different, maybe those regret sauces you have are made differently.
It's not my bag, I like flavor but not heat for the sake of heat. And my partner doesn't have a gall bladder so capsaicin + oil is a bad bad time
This is my opinion as well, it's blatantly misleading the viewers and no amount of inconvenience excuses it provided they're made aware of it. Didn't want to start an argument though.
This is my opinion as well, it's blatantly misleading the viewers and no amount of inconvenience excuses it provided they're made aware of it. Didn't want to start an argument though.
Sean has openly stated on Hot Ones episodes, multiple times, that the sauces do not increase in intensity but rather they pace them out for some peaks and valleys. He calls it a "symphony". Here's a moment from the one with Pedro Pascal where Sean states that the sauce is a shift down from the previous one. Another from Cate Blanchette realizing the current sauce was less spicy than the previous one and Sean acknowledging it and calling it their symphony. The big one is Elijah Wood, who I think was the first to bring attention to it and get the whole explanation out of Sean. I feel like there have been a lot more examples in the past few years but these I found from a collection of transcripts that go until 2022.
I have a love of hot sauces, I always have about six bottles on the go. I've had Da Bomb before, back in 2002. Some vendor in a mall was having a good time telling people they should try it. My cousin ordered 3 lbs. of wings with Da Bomb sauce without tasting it. It is still, to this day, the single spiciest thing I have ever experienced. Guests aren't exaggerating when they say it tastes terrible, it is supposed to be artificial, awful hot sauce that is just insanely spicy. It's supposed to taste like you're drinking Hollywood movie face-melting acid, I suppose.
I don't think I have ever paid attention to Scoville units because it always seemed arbitrary to me. Some sauces would claim they were in the hundreds of thousands and be no hotter than Sriracha. Others would mention a couple of thousand and then blow my socks off. I've been watching Hot Ones for years now and am only just realizing that I could not tell you the Scoville rating of any of the sauces on the show, I always just glossed over it. I'm not particularly surprised the numbers for them are manipulated to give the illusion but it is more than a little odd when the host and guest openly will say otherwise during the interviews.
I don't know anyone who actually paid attention to Scoville units anyway. It kind of strikes me the same as how people assume single-malt whiskey must mean it's the best: something that sounds plausible to a layperson but quickly falls apart under any scrutiny, and not something adhered to be any enthusiast.
I'm glad that Sean is cool with adressing it, it seems fair enough that they wouldn't want to completely wreck their guest just before the promo spot. Hot Ones is barely about the hot-sauce anyway at this point, the main draw for me is how good Sean and his writers are at doing interviews.
I don't really think any of this is really a valid argument. They have the number and a graphic on screen that is at best incredibly misleading as to how spicy the sauces are. Per the video, some of them are like 10 times milder than the show would have you think.
I don't really know anything about scoville units except that the higher the number, the spicier the sauce. So when the number keeps increasing on screen, I obviously took it at face value that they get stronger.
They are outright lying to their audience about their sauces and I don't see how that is in any way defensible.
I feel like you're taking this a little too seriously. It's not that big of a deal. The hot sauce is just framing for an interview. The interview is what people care about.
I think they just bought hot sauces with ascending scoville units when they set the show up, and it turns out it's not all that accurate, but it never mattered that much, so no point in changing things.
If the hot sauce is just a framing for an interview, then remove the Scoville Value from the sauces altogether. Call them "hot", "superhot", "extreme hot", "bazinga hot". Whatever you want. The "Scoville Value" makes the whole thing seem way more precise than it really is. It's misleading. If they called it "Unicorn Scale" that is measured in 100 Horn Degrees, people would believe it all the same.
Subway used to advertise 30cm sandwiches. Someone went to Subway with a ruler and measured it. It was much less. There were two solutions to that problem: (1) they could make their sandwiches 30cm, or (2) they could stop advertising their sandwiches in centimeters.
If precision is not the point, remove any pretense of precision.
Yes, there is really no reason for them to use an objective measurement other than to be misleading. Testing the sauces would be easily affordable for them, especially because they would only need to do it once per season, and be able to skip the duplicates.
Like they mentioned in the video, this has also potential of being dangerous as viewers could be mislead into thinking they can handle a 2+M scoville sauce, only to have a rough awakening when they try the real deal.
However, I also think there has to be something done from a regulation perspective. There seem to be two different measurement bases in use (dry and wet). But there is no visible distinction for the consumer which in of itself is already risky.
Scoville units are not an objective measurement under any circumstances. They are and have always been an attempt to numerically express subjective human experiences on a scale that can be easily compared. This is in contrast to something like measuring the actual quantities of various capsaicinoids in a hot sauce, which would be an objective measurement. Scoville units are usually tied to capsaicinoid content, but there are so many other factors that affect our perception of spiciness that you can't treat one as the proxy for the other. And no matter how you determine the Scoville rating of something, it will never be an objective measurement, because it's fundamentally just a systematized way of ranking a subjective qualia.
That doesn't necessarily mean they weren't being misleading with the Scoville ratings they chose to display, but I think it's important to distinguish between what an objective and subjective measurement is here when you start talking about things like medical risk and liability, as these are outside the bounds of what a Scoville unit could remotely communicate to a reasonable consumer. If you have a medical condition that could cause complications with very spicy food, you cannot rely on Scoville units to determine whether something is safe for you no matter how they are measured and how accurate they are. They just don't directly reflect any objective features of the food in that way.
Hot sauce advertising also doesn't have a great track record when it comes to the reliability of stuff like Scoville units in its marketing. This complicates the idea of finding "the real deal," as it were. I wouldn't necessarily be against regulating things like this to require accurate reporting based on consistent standards (though I'm still not sure Scoville units would be the best choice for what measurements to report), but as it stands there is no such regulation and Scoville units are used widely in advertising in ways that almost certainly are no more accurate than what's done on this show. This definitely colors what a reasonable person can be expected to conclude when seeing Scoville units in advertising a hot sauce (often much more prominently than is done on Hot Ones).
I don't see how scoville ratings aren't an objective measurement? Anyone with the equipment could repeat these tests and arrive at the same ballpark numbers. While one's subjective experience may not perfectly align with the rating, it sets reasonable expectations. It's similar to temperature measurements, they alone don't tell the whole story of how hot a day feels, but it provides usable expectations.
I don't watch Hot Ones and can't really tolerate heat well, so I'm watching this discussion from hopefully a fairly neutral position and:
The same objectively inconsistent numbers that don't tell a very good story?
It sounds to me like they don't.
The problem is Hot Ones hasn't tested the sauces and neither the manufacturers (excl. maybe Da Bomb), so it's not even clear where they got their numbers from in the first place.
In Hot Ones case, my understanding is that they're just using the Scoville rating of the relevant chili pepper used to make the given hot sauce. But I haven't actually checked this myself, that's just what others here seem to be noticing.
I think you're mistaking me saying that Scoville units are subjective with me saying they can't be measured at all, which I'm not doing. My point is that Scoville units are fundamentally designed to measure something subjective -- "spiciness" is a subjective experience, while "capsaicinoid quantity" is something that can be objectively measured. Obviously these things have a relationship, but because there are a huge number of factors other than capsaicinoid quantity that influence human experience of spiciness, the relationship is complicated.
Scoville units originally used a human tasting panel to reach their measurements. While this is the closest to directly measuring the experience of spiciness you can really get, it's got plenty of obvious flaws. So in the modern day, labs use high-performance liquid chromatography to measure quantity of capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin present and calculate the sample's "heat" based on the proportion of those compounds compared to the total mass (traditionally dried pepper mass). This solution is trying to extrapolate the subjective experience Scoville units are intended to represent from objective things that can be directly measured. There are already some issues here -- typically only the two most common capsaicinoids are taken into account, ignoring other spicy compounds. Traditionally this is done with dried peppers and ignored water content, which can cause inconsistencies even when just applying these methods to chili peppers themselves. But ultimately this is probably still a decent approximation when applied to peppers specifically. It's important to recognize that it is an approximation, though -- there is no way to directly measure what Scoville units actually represent.
But there are some pretty huge problems with applying a method like this to a food product made with other ingredients as well as chilis, like hot sauce. Even if we assume water content is dealt with somehow, there are plenty of ingredients that can have pretty drastically different effects on the human experience of spiciness. Acids and fats interact with capsaicinoids in ways that we know have effects like these -- this is why people recommend drinking milk when eating spicy food. The same thai curry recipe will have a very different spice level if you substitute coconut milk for an equivalent quantity of water. These interactions are complex enough that I don't even think it's possible to adapt the existing formula made for dried chili to rigorously account for the effects of other ingredients. The result is that while you can apply the same technique to get a value that is even quite consistent when taken more than once, it's much harder to claim that this actually approximates the thing that Scoville units are intended to measure. There's just so many variables that we know have some impact that just straight-up aren't being taken into account.
I disagree. I do think it's a big deal to lie to your audience.
I still don't agree about it not being lying. Different batches, sure. The manufacturers could at least test
a bunch of different batches then, average the numbers out, and put that number on the label.
Also, I belive Hot Ones' company is worth $80M. They can afford $60 tests. But the near 3 million Scoville number is more impressive (and there is no way that they don't get a lot of sales off of just that number alone)
Putting those numbers on screen on the videos is advertising. But sure, maybe the margins of earnings from that part is less than what they earn from their media.
Or make your sauce in such large batches that the natural variation in spiciness from one pepper to the next becomes meaningless. This is why sauces from mega brands like Tabasco and Sriracha are very consistent.
Sriracha is the type of sauce; Huy Fong is the brand with the rooster and the green lid.
Dude, chill. They have the sauces arranged so there are some spicy but pleasant ones up top so the guest builds some confidence, then they destroy them with battery acid so everyone can see how they cope, then they taper off with moderately spicy ones so they aren't gibbering messes when they do the promo. The PR wonks are happy because the plugs get done, the guest and host are happy because they got some good questions in, and the viewers are happy because we got to see a famous person eat industrial spice additive and lose their shit.
I feel like you're getting hung up on set dressing.
I'm getting hung up on morality.
Chill yourself.
I'm pretty sure there was too many different things I said there for my lack of care about how they represent Scoville units to make everything I said "invalid". I certainly wasn't excusing the discrepancy, I called it "more than a little odd".
All I said was that I view Scoville units like the points in Whose Line, and that nobody in the know seems to pay them any attention since they never really matched up with the heat of the sauces. This is because, for the longest time, Scoville ratings were derived from subjective tasting panels, not a lab test. Many hot sauce competitions still use that method to this day. This isn't like lying about a SI or regulated measurement like calories or weight in a food package. Scoville ratings have always been more of a marketing gimmick. After all, many of the sauces advertise different numbers than they would be rated with the lab method.
The Scoville numbers in a graphic I just realized I have never paid attention to will continue to be of zero import to me. Absolute none of my interest in Hot Ones, hot sauces, or their overall product involves the accuracy of the Scoville units in that graphic.
I suppose there's also the question of how much of a lie it is if the graphics say one thing but the host and guest say another directly in the show but considering that I, a regular viewer, was already aware that the sauces don't ramp up because I paid attention to the show, I can't say I feel lied to.
For me to be incensed about misleading Scoville units on their transition graphics, I would need to forget a lifetime experience with Scoville units on hot sauces, and what I have heard them say on the show multiple times.
I read your whole comment as defending Hot Ones I suppose.
I really don't agree that that the points don't matter. It very much does. They use the high numbers to market themselves on being the spiciest. Meaning the most extreme, the biggest, the best.
Yes, and that is a big problem too! How is that not misleading and false advertising?
That you don't care about the numbers is no biggie. We can disagree about that and that's fine. If they directly say that the number is not correct then I have missed that. Talking about it in this harmony/symphony way is much different and is not an admittance that the numbers are correct - and those numbers are practically front and center on the screen so not sure how the audience, generally, is supposed to not care about that.
Because it's not really consequential to the show, nor the product, and they are using a real basis to derive the numbers (using the Scoville rating of the peppers that go into the sauce) even if the methodology makes it rather inaccurate to final taste (i.e. not rating the final product in a lab). People watch Hot Ones for the interview and how hot sauces act like a truth serum, not for the integrity spice ramp that would create a more torturous scenario. They're advertising hot sauces in general and it's good marketing for all these sauces but it's not all centred around the integrity of if the spiciness really is ramping up. Even when Hot Ones sell their season packs of hot sauces, they do not actually include the version of Da Bomb they use on the show.
And the end result of taste can contradict the Scoville ratings—many people find Da Bomb tastes spicier than other ones that are rated higher. And some guests on the show actually find the Last Dab to be spicier than Da Bomb, which goes against the lab-tested ratings in this video. Spiciness is very subjective, even NIST acknowledges that the lab-rated methods of deriving Scoville ratings still results in something subjective. It's just not something that can be objectively measured and regulated like weights and nutritional content.
I once had a whole season of Hot Ones sauces at my disposal (except with the alternate version of Da Bomb) and honestly, I found them all to be fairly mild in the end. I've had spicier habanero sauces at Mexican restaurants. But other people had a very different response to them. It really is very subjective and there's no real way to know for sure without trying it yourself.
This is why I likened Scoville ratings to the notion about single-malt whiskeys. There's a lot of whiskeys out there that market themselves as high quality because they are single-malt but that's largely bunk because that doesn't determine the quality of the final product. It's impossible to regulate and score the quality of a whiskey in (compared to the alcohol content, for example). I recently had one that advertised itself as "Exceptionally smooth" and yet it was the single roughest whiskey I've ever tasted in my life. I could call that false advertising but how would I really prove that? There are reviews from people online who say it's super smooth to them. There's no objective or reliable way to measure smoothness like this. Similarly, it's basically impossible to know exactly how hot you will find a hot sauce by Scoville rating until you try it yourself. It's a decent guideline when done right but depending on a bunch of factors, you could still find yourself wondering how it got that score after tasting it.
Like I said elsewhere just now, there is no way that the number isn't consequential to the show/product because they 100% are earning more money simply by having an impressive number on it. It is the opposite of integrity.
Placebo can be very powerful.
The rating is of course subjective but the number isn't. I never eat spicy stuff so even their mildest sauce would likely be super uncomfortable for me - so therefore my level is at most 1460, right? Your level is a lot higher of course if you found all of them fairly mild. But for us both it is a guide that we should be able to rely on.
In any case, we clearly aren't going to agree.
I'd love to hear a detailed explanation how the show is directly earning more money from these Scoville units. Use me as your example, since I've already explained how I've engaged and participated with the show. How have I directly contributed to their money via those Scoville ratings?
Some people finding the Last Dab hotter is not a placebo. Again, NIST has described Scoville ratings as subjective with the peppers and there are many factors that go into how hot the final hot sauce product feels. Some people are more sensitive to the formulation of that sauce than others. People more accustomed to spicy foods and Scoville units acknowledge this. What basis do you have to dismiss this as placebo?
The number is the rating. Those are not two separate things. A personal max number is not how it works (especially one so low). When it comes to hot sauce, it's a loose approximation of the spiciness of the sauce at best. If you watch the show, you will see plenty of guests say they never eat spicy stuff and then find that they can handle most of the sauces just fine. Again, there are many factors that go into how spicy a hot sauce ends up feeling. A Scoville rating is just the start of the story, not the end summation.
For what it's worth, the bottles themselves don't appear to have the Scoville units. When I saw the bottles in the store today, I only noticed a 1-to-10 spiciness scale.
Scovilles are definitely iffy when you get down to specifics. As a very "big picture" / zoomed out idea of how hot things are, they can be a decent guide, but only to a point. There are so many other facets to spicy things. Even just where and how they burn and how the body reacts to them. It can be "easier" to handle some spicier stuff, if it burns in a way you mind less (or if the heat is super hot but doesn't stick around for a long time, etc)
So I'm biased, because I do rather like Hot Ones. I've seen a few dozen episodes. And I'll be honest, this feels like a video that's trying to manufacture drama for clicks. They try to assign medical liability to an entertainment show, they dangle info but tell you it's only available on their Patreon, and they contradict their own reporting without explanation. They have an interview with Smokin' Ed Currie, the guy who bred Pepper X, who says that he doesn't assign a Scoville rating to his sauces and that Hot Ones is assigning it based on the pepper that goes into it. But earlier in the video, they showed footage of Ed telling Hot Ones the Scoville rating for the sauce he'd developed for them from Pepper X, and in that footage he gives a rating for the sauce and a different rating for the pepper.
I'm willing to believe the actual Scoville ratings are as wildly different from the reported ratings as the video says. And no, I don't think it's a good look for the show. But while I think it's reasonable to point it out and expect the show to engage in honesty, it feels like anyone getting outraged over it hasn't actually watched the show. When they put the hot sauces on screen with the rating graphic beside them, it's really just a brief bumper to break up the different portions of the interview. It's not the focus of the show at all.
While I knew The Last Dab was a sauce made specifically for the show, I had never heard of Pepper X before this video, nor that the sauce was the exclusive way to taste that pepper. They don't mention it on the show and they don't aggressively market the sauce or any of the others. The show is all about the unusual interview format that humanizes the interviewee. They ask questions that are actually interesting, or just cheeky and lighthearted, or a deep cut into their past that they're surprised to be asked about... rather than talking the whole time about whatever their latest promotion is. It's the only kind of celebrity interview that I think is actually worth watching. And when they do chat about the sauces, it's often a theme that the expectations are different from reality, or that the taste is more important than just the pure heat level. (That latter is something which I understand is a common thought among hot sauce aficionados; I'm not a fan of spicy food at all, but I'm close to someone who likes the hot sauce scene.)
While I do agree that the scoville ratings are misleading, one thing to keep in mind is that:
and
With regards to #2, sauces made with extract tend to take full effect immediately, and usually subside more quickly. the sauces that are "all pepper" take a little time to build up (which won't happen with the one bite per sauce on Hot Ones).
I've eaten pretty much all of these sauces and more and also grow my own super hots to make my own sauces, so I can also confirm what a lot of others on here are saying with wide heat variances per pepper and per sauce batch. I can also confirm that Da Bomb tastes like battery acid, so don't waste your money unless you want the novelty.
Da Bomb was designed to quickly and easily elevate the spiciness of a large amount of chili. There's a video of that and the creator says they're happy for the exposure but Da Bomb is not supposed to be used like that.
The creator can say that all he wants, but the fact is that the sauce itself makes no claim of this and it is labeled as a "hot sauce", not a food additive. Even if this dubious claim were true, Da Bomb is a vile tasting sauce and I believe adding it to chili would simply ruin said chili. Adding a single super hot pepper to a large pot of chili will likely do the trick for most people.
Very interesting. I'm not surprised about Da Bomb, but I'm baffled about the early sauces, especially the two Hot Ones brand sauces (1 and 4) being in the wrong order - why? They could simply swap them around and they would still be in the reserved slots.
Those Scoville levels are from a single test per sauce, and from the video it sounds like the sauce makers themselves don't test their product.
There could be a lot of variation between different batches of sauces, especially across different seasons.
Not to mention the logistics for the show saying, "Hey. These Scoville numbers have been inaccurate for 10 years so we're going to re-order everything from now on." Which would either require dethroning the last dab or making the last dab with "non-natural" ingredients by adding in capsaicin extract. And at the end of the day, Hot Ones is really more about the interviews than the sauces. It probably makes a better interview for the guest to peak on spice level before the end, as opposed to right at the end when they typically do outros and pitch their current work.
The difference between the states number for the last one compared to this channel's test though is an order of magnitude. That's inexcusable in my opinion. It's misleading and false advertising - and that's putting it mildly.
Is that the show's fault or the sauce manufacturer's fault?
Does it matter?
Personally, I don't care, I'm asking your thoughts. But if the sauce manufacturer says "ONE MILLION SCOVILLES" is the show supposed to test every bottle - which as noted is like questionable as a measurement - to confirm before they use the manufacturer's claims?
Everyone's perception of spice is so unique, and the same pepper can have massively different amounts of heat depending on a variety of factors, plus everyone wants to have a stupid high Scoville rating for some reason, this doesn't surprise me, but if there is responsibility, it'd be on the people making it, in my mind.
Edit: You answered similar replies elsewhere so don't feel pressed to respond. I just didn't see them.
I suppose you're right it's on the manufacturer to test it when it comes to the sauces on the show that are not their own. But they're the ones making multiple of the sauces so when their name is on it, it's their responsibility.
I would liken it to the Honey scandal. They should at least, like MKBHD, address it - Honey was an outright scam though which I wouldn't go so far as to call this, but the Youtubers having them as sponsor still took responsibility and dropped them. So in my opinion Hot Ones should address this video and adjust the numbers in their videos.
I don't follow the show, and I think high scoville numbers along with "challenges" to eat the hottest thing are just plain stupid so I'm very much not the target audience. If they're making the sauces they should be held as accountable as anyone else - but as far as I can tell there's basically no regulation around scoville numbers or whatever (or why else would someone sell chips that could kill children in gas stations) so tbh it's more of a failing of our regulation.
I like the few interviews I've seen clips of but the "haha they're eating hot stuff and are uncomfortable" has never been any of the appeal. Honey literally took money away from people it was contracted with. These guys have used the same level of scoville marketing as every hot sauce. I don't think they're the same, but I'm coming from the outside, so I don't really have a horse in this fight.
Honestly, this makes me want to look at the sauces I’ve picked up over the years in my cabinet. Most are great, and I can tolerate some hot stuff imo, but there are a few that I definitely regret purchasing. Those are the ones that literally hurt as they’re going through my system and not just a “hot” flavor in the mouth or throat. Moreso pain in the stomach or intestine. I don’t suffer from heartburn from any other foods either so whatever is in them is nuts.
I know someone else mentioned that extract based sauces hits different, maybe those regret sauces you have are made differently.
It's not my bag, I like flavor but not heat for the sake of heat. And my partner doesn't have a gall bladder so capsaicin + oil is a bad bad time
This is my opinion as well, it's blatantly misleading the viewers and no amount of inconvenience excuses it provided they're made aware of it. Didn't want to start an argument though.
I really don't see how it isn't blatant misleading either. But yes, let's leave it at that