There are
chili peppers and then there are the
Ghost Chilis.
In New Mexico, we take chile peppers very seriously. We grow (and probably eat) more peppers than any other state, and the famous Chile Pepper Institute (CPI) is sponsored by our state's primary agricultural university.
So it's not surprising that it took New Mexicans to make a tasty hot sauce from the hottest chile peppers in the world.
In 2001, a graduate student at New Mexico State University visited India and sent some Bhut Jolokia seeds back to the CPI. (Bhut Jolokia is also known as Naga Jolokia (King Cobra Chili), Naga Morich, Naga Jolokia, Bih Jolokia, Borbih Jolokia, Nagahari, Nagajolokia, and Raja Mirchi.)
Over the next few years, CPI Director Paul Bosland grew Bhut Jolokia, Red Savina, and Habanero peppers under controlled settings.
In 2005, Dr. Bosland tested the three peppers' "hotness" using the Scoville Heat Units (SHUs) rating system. He discovered the Bhut Jolokia to rate a whopping 1,001,304 SHU's...twice the SHU's of the Red Savina and three times the Habanero! (An average Jalapeno is only 10,000 SCU's; New Mexico green chilis are only 1500!) Finally, in 2007, The Guiness Book of World Records confirmed, with a certificate issued to Dr. Bosland, that the Ghost Chilis of Assam, India were indeed the hottest in the world!
But CPI didn't stop there: they wanted to make the Bhut Jolokia marketable in the West. So they set out to make a tasty sauce from this new "Hottest Pepper In The World." Partnering with CaJohns Fiery Foods, they worked on a variety of combinations before settling on a recipe that mixes pure Bhut Jolokia grown in India with vinegar, sugar, sale, garlic, and lemon extract. The result is the Holy Jolokia Hot Sauce featured here...powerfully hot, but not overpowering.
"We didn't want to make it too hot, because we wanted people to enjoy it and be able to taste the uniqueness of the Bhut Jolokia," Dr. Bosland said.
Now a portion of the price of every bottle of Holy Jolokia goes to support the work of CPI so that they can continue to be "the final arbiter of all chile questions." CPI is the only organization in the world devoted to education, research and archiving information related to chile peppers.
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