# About the Scoville Heat Scale

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/about-the-scoville-heat-scale/815107>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 30, 2018, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/about-the-scoville-heat-scale/815107 "2018-05-30T04:42:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Mrdeals](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ea666f/32.png) [@Mrdeals](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mrdeals)\
**Post date:** [May 30, 2018, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/about-the-scoville-heat-scale/815107/1 "2018-05-30T04:42:13Z")

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I was watching a video on YouTube with this group saying they made a taco that had 10M scoville units.

How they came to this is they mixed a 1M scoville sauce, with a 500K scoville sauce, with a 750K scoville sauce, etc…

But I kept thinking, I don’t think how the Scoville index works…is it?

If 1M Scoville was the hottest sauce they used then that would be the maximum heat wouldn’t it?

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**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\
**Post date:** [May 30, 2018, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/about-the-scoville-heat-scale/815107/2 "2018-05-30T04:49:47Z")

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Epic Meal Time, right? The one where they had to evacuate the house because they literally pepper-sprayed themselves? Yeah, I was thinking the same thing myself – if they added a 500K Scoville sauce to a 1M Scoville sauce, then they’re actually diluting the sauce, not making it stronger. :dubious: That’s still pretty massively hot, though.

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**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\
**Post date:** [May 30, 2018, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/about-the-scoville-heat-scale/815107/3 "2018-05-30T06:29:46Z")

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Correct; the Scoville scale measures how concentrated the sauce is, not the amount of it you put in. A drop of pure capsaicin has 16 million units, and so does a gallon.

That said, it’s harder to eat an entire bowl of nuclear tindaloo than a few bites, so quantity has a quality all of its own.

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**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\
**Post date:** [May 30, 2018, 7:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/about-the-scoville-heat-scale/815107/4 "2018-05-30T07:33:56Z")

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So, it would be possible to name a new unit of measurement, the Scoville Scoop, that has (nominally) the same quantity of heat units as one-tenth of a millilitre of pure capsaicin, and would equal a different volume of each kind of sauce, depending on their strengths.