When you think of food, you typically think of the last thing you ate or your favorite food. This could be anything from apples to mac and cheese to pizza to ramen noodles (a favorite among college students like myself), but when we think of food, we normally think of foods that are normal or pleasing to us. This time, we're discovering the hottest, coldest, spiciest, anything-est foods out there!

Spiciest

As a spice fanatic myself, it was only a matter of time before I discovered the spiciest food ever created. I found the Ghost Pepper. The Ghost Pepper, or Bhut jolokia as it's known in Bangladesh, is ranked on the Scoville scale at 1,041,427.

The Scoville scale was made by Wilbur Scoville who was an American pharmacist. He devised the scale by taking an extract of the food and putting it in sugar water. He would then give it to a panel of five judges. Then he would take some of the extract out of the sugar water until the judges no longer detected any spiciness. Since this is a human test, it is subjective, but still good for reference. For comparison, a jalapeno can range from 1,000-20,000 on the scale, whereas a banana pepper ranges only 0-500. So it's really hot! But as many of you know, this is indeed not the hottest pepper.

The hottest pepper is currently the Carolina Reaper. The Carolina reaper is not a natural plant, as it is genetically bred between the previously mentioned Ghost Pepper and a Red Habanero. Regardless, it was dubbed the hottest chili pepper in 2013 and hasn't been beaten yet at a whopping 1.57 million on the Scoville scale, effectively 1.5 times hotter than the Ghost pepper, but my search didn't stop there. Yes, the Carolina Reaper is the hottest chili pepper , but what was the hottest food ever? This was a bit more complicated. The key component in most pepper is this chemical called Capsaicin, of which is 16 million on the Scoville scale. Which is insane! You can order this online if you're insane enough to do it. Or you can find places that put the extract in their food.

This is where my research hit almost a dead halt. When you look up world's spiciest food, you immediately find the ghost pepper and the Carolina Reaper; but when you look up the sourest, hottest, coldest, etc., you only come up with blogs, science, and opinions. No official scales as far as the mouse can click. So for the next portion, I'm going to list foods that I believe are the -est of foods.

Sourest

This may seem off topic, but have you ever seen the YouTube show Good Mythical Morning? If you haven't, go see it now because they're great. If you have, one of their recent episodes featured just this problem. There is no sour scale, so they created one. And they found that the sourest food by far was the Japenese Umeboshi.

The Umeboshi is translated to "Japenese salt plums" or "pickled plums" and is normally served with rice balls for breakfast or lunch. I'm not sure who would want to wake up to Umeboshi, but hey, I don't judge.

Coldest

Pretty sure this would be dry ice but whatever you do, DO NOT EAT DRY ICE!

Sweetest

Um...sugar...

Ok, so I think you get the point, after spicy and sour there isn't much to go off of. So hopefully I can pick a list a little more...well done next time.

Cheers,

Winter S.

If you want to see more of my writing, or if you want to read these articles early. Check out my website at www.winterstrawberry.weebly.com