A five-point scale and SHU: how to read the number on the label

Two heat labels sit side by side on every one of our pages: a score out of five chillies and a Scoville count. They are not the same thing, and it is worth knowing what each measures before buying something “to start with”.

Five out of five is a position in the range

The number from 1 to 5 describes the heat of a chilli relative to the hottest variety that particular producer grows, not relative to anything else on the market. So “4 out of 5” at one producer is entirely comparable, and at another it may not be. Read it as a position on their scale, not as an absolute value.

SHU measures the chilli, not the sauce

The Scoville count describes the raw chilli. A finished sauce is not the same thing: a 100 ml bottle contains considerably less chilli than a fruit does, so the real heat is lower than the variety's. This is why two bottles of the same variety at different concentrations are, in practice, less different than the variety names suggest.

Where to start

If you have never eaten a hot chilli, start from the lowest number in the range, not from the middle. In this brand that means Asado (a moderately hot but aromatic chilli) and the Habanero sauce, described as 2 out of 5 even though it carries one of the best known hot varieties in the world — because there is little chilli in the sauce.

Seedlings are not the same as fruit

For seedlings the SHU figure describes the fruit you will eventually get, not the seedling. A jalapeño seedling carries 2,500 to 8,000 Scoville units, and Carolina Reaper more than a million. You are buying the seedling — the fruit arrives in late summer, if everything goes the way it should.

And last: blends are not sauces

Ground spice blends have their own scale because their heat cannot be read off a chilli label. Mongo is 3 out of 5, and that is a number describing the blend, not any one of the three chillies in it.