How hot is hot?
The heat of hot peppers is measured in Scoville Heat Units, named for American chemist Wilbur Scoville, who in 1912 created a method of rating peppers.
The Scoville scale ranks peppers based on how much an extract of the pepper must be diluted so that you can no longer taste the heat.
Peppers vary in heat depending on where and how they're grown, but a sweet bell pepper with no detectable heat would have a Scoville rating of zero.
According to the Scoville chart compiled by St. Louis-based spicy foods blogger Scott Roberts (scottrobertsweb.com), a jalapeno would rank from 2,500 to 8,000, a Thai pepper from 50,000 to 100,000 and a Scotch bonnet pepper from 100,000 to 325,000.
The bhut jolokia pepper (also known as the ghost pepper) is one of the hottest in the world and has a Scoville rating of approximately 1 million.