Naga Morich vs Ghost Pepper

These two come from the same corner of the map and may be the same pepper wearing two names. The Ghost Pepper, Bhut Jolokia, is the landrace of Assam, Nagaland and Manipur in northeastern India. Jolokia is the Assamese word for a capsicum, as Bosland and Baral note in their 2007 HortScience paper. The Naga Morich is what the same kind of pepper is called across the border in Bangladesh and the Sylhet region, morich being Bengali for pepper. Joy and Michael Michaud of Sea Spring Seeds, who bred their Dorset Naga from Naga Morich bought in a Bangladeshi shop in Bournemouth, argue the two names are most likely versions of one traditional variety.

The species question took a while. India's Defence Research Laboratory reported the pepper as Naga Jolokia in 2000, classed it as Capsicum frutescens, and put it at 855,000 SHU. Bosland and Baral grew Bhut Jolokia at Las Cruces from seed brought back from India in 2001 and found the morphology of C. chinense: multiple pendent flowers per node, creamy white corollas, and a reduced calyx constriction. Their RAPD markers placed it in C. chinense with eight chinense-specific markers and three specific to C. frutescens, which is why the ghost pepper is called a natural interspecific hybrid. The pods ran 5 to 8 cm long with an undulating surface and ripened green to bright red.

The published heat numbers belong mostly to the ghost pepper. In the 2005 replicated trial the HPLC mean was 1,001,304 SHU, two commercial labs confirmed at 927,199 and 879,953, and Red Savina in the same field read 248,556. Guinness took the record on that basis in 2007. NMSU's 2012 trial averaged 1,019,687 SHU for Bhut Jolokia, but individual plants ranged from 279,315 to 1,578,548, a spread that says more about weather and soil than genetics. For the Naga Morich the figures are the Michauds' own: a plant that tested at 923,000 SHU in 2006, and in 2007 green fruit at 655,900 next to red fruit from the same harvest at 878,400. Those are one grower's tests, not a controlled trial.

Eating them, the ghost pepper is famous for the delay. The heat arrives seconds after the bite and builds for minutes, under a slightly sweet, smoky fruit. The Naga Morich is a bit rounder in the pod and a touch more floral. In Assam and Nagaland the ghost pepper seasons pork and chutneys and has been smeared on fences to keep elephants off crops. Both end up in hot sauces, powders and endurance stunts, and either stands in for the other with no adjustment. The confusion worth avoiding is with the Naga Viper, a British hybrid, and the Dorset Naga, a selected strain, both downstream of the Naga Morich rather than synonyms for it.

Sources

• Bosland and Baral, HortScience 42(2), 2007: 'Bhut Jolokia', The World's Hottest Known Chile Pepper is a Putative Naturally Occurring Interspecific Hybrid
• Bosland, Coon and Reeves, HortTechnology 22(4), 2012: 'Trinidad Moruga Scorpion' Pepper is the World's Hottest Measured Chile Pepper
• Sea Spring Seeds (Joy and Michael Michaud): The Naga Saga, the story of the naga chilli in the UK