Scoville heat converter
Convert the heat of peppers and hot sauces between Scoville units, capsaicin in ppm or percent, and ASTA units.
That's about the same as a jalapeño. To stop tasting it, you would dilute it about 5,000 times in sugar water.
What it means
How hot is that?
Pepper heat varies several-fold with the variety, ripeness and growing conditions; figures are typical values. 1 ppm of capsaicinoids ≈ 16 SHU.
Every unit
That heat in every unit
Learn
Three things worth knowing
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Multiply ppm by 16
100 ppm of capsaicin is 1,600 SHU. A 1 % extract is 160,000 SHU, as hot as a mild habanero.
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Tasting panels
Scoville’s test relied on five tasters and their tongues tired fast, so results varied by 50 %. The American Spice Trade Association replaced it with chemistry in the 1980s.
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Hot sauce is not the pepper
A habanero sauce is mostly vinegar and carrot. It can be ten times milder than the habanero in it.
Shortcuts
Popular heat conversions
Background
About the Scoville scale
In 1912 the pharmacist Wilbur Scoville dissolved dried pepper in alcohol, diluted it in sugar water and asked a panel when they could no longer taste the heat. A jalapeño had to be diluted about 5,000 times: 5,000 Scoville heat units.
Labs now measure the capsaicinoids directly by chromatography and convert: pure capsaicin is 16 million SHU, so 1 ppm ≈ 16 SHU.