Carolina Reaper vs Ghost Pepper

One is a landrace and the other is a deliberate cross. The Ghost Pepper, Bhut Jolokia, comes from Assam in northeastern India, where farmers grew it for generations under names like Naga Jolokia and Bih Jolokia before anyone measured it. The Carolina Reaper comes from Ed Currie's fields in Rock Hill, South Carolina. PuckerButt's own history has Currie growing peppers at home in the 1980s, running 800 plants across his yard and his neighbors' by the 1990s, and releasing the Reaper in 2013. The database records its reported parentage as a La Soufrière habanero from Saint Vincent crossed with a Naga-type pepper, which makes the Ghost Pepper, or something very like it, one of the Reaper's parents.

The paper trail for the Ghost Pepper starts with a 2007 HortScience article by Paul Bosland and Jit Baral at New Mexico State. Seed had reached the Chile Pepper Institute in 2001. In a 2005 replicated field trial at Las Cruces it averaged 1,001,304 SHU by HPLC, and two commercial labs confirmed at 927,199 and 879,953. That made it the first pepper measured past one million, and Guinness World Records took it as the world's hottest in 2007. The DNA work in the same paper found Capsicum frutescens markers in it, so the Ghost Pepper is a C. chinense with a natural cross between species somewhere in its past.

The Reaper's numbers are Guinness numbers. Guinness certified it in November 2013 at an average of 1,569,300 SHU, beating the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T at 1,463,700. PuckerButt cites record years of 2013 and 2017 and a figure of over 1.64 million SHU. It held the title ten years. In October 2023 Guinness named Currie's Pepper X the new record holder at an average of 2,693,000 SHU, verified by Winthrop University. The Reaper is no longer the hottest pepper. It is still the hottest one most people have heard of.

To eat, they behave differently. The heat of the Ghost Pepper arrives late, several seconds after the bite, and then builds. The Reaper comes on faster, and tasters usually get a fruity, faintly sweet note before it does. Both are sauce and powder peppers rather than fresh vegetables. The Ghost Pepper has the longer history in the pot, dried and ground in Assamese and Naga kitchens. The Reaper has the longer history on camera.

Sources

• Bosland and Baral 2007, HortScience 42(2): 'Bhut Jolokia', the World's Hottest Known Chile Pepper is a Putative Naturally Occurring Interspecific Hybrid (doi:10.21273/HORTSCI.42.2.222)
• Guinness World Records, December 2013: November, the world's hottest chilli and the longest basketball shot
• Guinness World Records, October 2023: Pepper X dethrones Carolina Reaper as world's hottest chilli pepper
• PuckerButt Pepper Company: Our Roots