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Technology: Testing a pepper's hotness without tasting
A pepper's hotness depends on its chemical makeup. A new mathematical model can gauge how hot a pepper is without any taste tasting.
BAY NEWS 9 -- A Baylor University chemist has developed a new way to gauge how hot a pepper is without tasting it.
Peppers get their hotness from chemicals called capsaicinoids (cap-SAY-iss-in-oids), and the hotness of a pepper is measured on a scale from 0 to 100,000.
Kenneth Busch developed a mathematical approach to measuring the hotness of a pepper, which he calls multivariate regression analysis.
The model learns how hot peppers are, so when it identifies an unknown pepper, it compares it to its previous knowledge of peppers. Using the pepper's heat spectrum, the model estimates how hot other peppers will be.
Busch sees all kinds of possibilities this technology might lead to, such as an instant pepper tester.
"You could have an instrument that you just put the probe up to the pepper and say that's how hot it is," said Busch.
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