The Decade of the Chile Pepper

The Guinness Book of World Records declared the Red Savina the world’s hottest pepper in 1994. It was just one of a number of mileposts in the great Scoville escalation race of the 1990s, the decade when America went nuts for spicy food—and spicy food, in turn, got hotter and hotter.

It was the heyday of Chile Pepper magazine, a time when “chileheads” began testing their limits at jalapeño-eating contests and boutique hot sauces were all the rage. In the early ’90s, when the U.S. started importing dried and fresh habaneros—cheaply. In large quantities—from the Yucatán and Belize, entrepreneurs like Garcia got to thinking: If Americans wanted fire in their food, why not sell them an inferno? Garcia now confesses that he didn’t stumble upon the Red Savina in the way he described to the press: An aerospace engineer. Budding entrepreneur, he emptied his kids’ college funds to invest in the creation of a new, consistently extra-hot habanero variant.

Demand spiked in parts of the country with large South Asian and Caribbean communities such as Chicago, New York, and Miami, but the Red Savina found an even greater audience among people who were simply excited to try the world’s hottest chile. In the late 1980s, Tim was picking up bottles of Latin American and Caribbean hot sauces, and the couple noticed there was no nationwide source.

In 1989, Mo Hotta Mo Betta (a phrase that Tim, a surfer, had picked up in Hawaii) printed a few hundred catalogs in its first run and sent copies to the editors of food publications around the country. Chile culture was a whole aesthetic: Suddenly, people across the country were hanging ristras of red New Mexico chiles in their kitchens—many of whom had never set foot in the Southwest.

As the 1990s progressed, and competitors to Mo Betta Mo Hotta emerged (such as the Hot Hot Hot , one of the Web’s first online stores), a cadre of hot sauce collectors emerged, ordering bottle after bottle to display on their dining room shelves. Chile aficionados like the Eidsons and DeWitt were not fans of these ultra-hot sauces. But the prospect of insanity, death, or public humiliation only seemed to spark the imagination of chileheads. “At the Fiery Foods Show, we had to institute rules that companies could only [hand out tastes] of the super-hot sauces on the end of a toothpick,” DeWitt states. “Otherwise, there’d be projectile vomiting.

It was not only disgusting but unsanitary.” When the Eidsons produced Mo Hotta Mo Betta’s first in-house line of sauces in 1997, it included an ultra-hot sauce to satisfy the adventurous—but instead of oleoresin, they used Frank Garcia’s Red Savinas. The race for ever-spicier chiles and hot sauces intensified through the late ’90s.

In 1998, the New York Times documented that hot sauce had become a $180 million business, $327 million in today’s dollars. “I used to go to Albertsons [a West Coast grocery store] and count the number of hot and spicy products on the shelves. The McIlhenny Company picked up Red Savinas in order to introduce a Habanero Tabasco in 1996. His pepper held on to its world record until the early 2000s, when chileheads traveling in India shipped seeds from an Assamese pepper called the bhut jolokia (ghost pepper) back to the United States.

When the New Mexico Chile Pepper Institute measured their heat level, it clocked in at 1 million Scoville heat units. According to Decades after DeWitt left Chile Pepper magazine, he, he thinks the Scoville race of the 1990s was about a collective craving for new sensations. “One person called it culinary bungee jumping, which is a bit of an exaggeration,” he explains. “People were looking for a lot of adventure in their food, and chiles provided that adventure.” Besides, the Eidsons add, spicy foods were fun.

By the 2000s, the Scoville escalation race plateaued—many of us, it turns out, have a limited tolerance for vomiting over our dinner—and self-dosing with capsaicin for kicks evolved into a mainstream rite of passage.