Wing Country

Wing CountryHow hot do you want it

Every rung below is somebody's own word for their own food. One bottle in 22 publishes a number.

The ladder

None
Butter, garlic, cheese. Nothing in it bites.
Garlic parmesan wings
Mild 🌶
Sweet, salty, smoky. Heat is somewhere in the room, not on the wing.
Alabama white sauce wingsLemon pepper wingsOld Bay wingsChicago mild sauce wingsMumbo sauce wingsSmoked barbecue wingsMild sauce “Mild”Mumbo sauce “Mild”
Medium 🌶🌶
The default order almost everywhere, and the one Buffalo means.
Buffalo wingsKorean fried chicken wingsMemphis dry-rub wingsRochester breaded wings
Hot 🌶🌶🌶
You notice it between wings now, not just during.
Jerk wings
Very hot 🌶🌶🌶🌶
Cayenne paste in frying fat. Bread underneath for a reason.
Nashville hot wings

How hot can you take it?

Six questions. It hands you a rung, not a verdict.

A jalapeño on a nacho is…
You order wings. The counter asks how hot.
There is a sauce on the menu with a name like a weapon.
Halfway through, your face is going.
There is a waiver.
Tomorrow.

The one number anybody publishes

1 of 22 bottles here carries a Scoville figure. It is the cayenne pepper sauce under most Buffalo wings in America, and it lands below a jalapeño. Scoville heat units come from a lab assay of capsaicin in dried material, and the article behind the scale says the number moves with seed, climate, soil and method. Every figure below is somebody's published measurement, lined up on one axis.

1001k10k100k1mScoville heat units, ten times further along for every stepSweet peppersSweet peppers: 0–500 SHU0–500Frank's RedHot OriginalFrank's RedHot Original: 450 SHU450JalapeñoJalapeño: 2,000–10,000 SHU2,000–10,000Cayenne pepperCayenne pepper: 30,000–50,000 SHU30,000–50,000HabaneroHabanero: 300,000–445,000 SHU300,000–445,000Ghost pepperGhost pepper: 855,000–1,041,427 SHU855,000–1,041,427Carolina ReaperCarolina Reaper: 1,463,700–1,641,183 SHU1,463,700–1,641,183Pepper XPepper X: 2,600,000 SHU2,600,000
The same figures as a table, with who published each one
WhatScovilleWho published itNote
Sweet peppers0–500Wikipediathe bottom of the published scale
Frank's RedHot Original450McCormick & Companythe cayenne pepper sauce under most Buffalo wings in America
Jalapeño2,000–10,000Wikipediaa few thousand to over 10,000, depending on how it grew
Cayenne pepper30,000–50,000Wikipediathe pepper the sauce is named for
Habanero300,000–445,000Wikipedia
Ghost pepper855,000–1,041,427Wikipedia855,000 reported by India's Defence Research Laboratory in 2000; 1,041,427 in 2004
Carolina Reaper1,463,700–1,641,183Wikipediaaverage and peak
Pepper X2,600,000Wikipediaover 2.6 million — the top of the table

What a maker prints instead

3 bottles print a heat word on the front. Those words sit on the sauce pages exactly as the maker wrote them, and none of them converts into a number.

Yangnyeom sauce“Spicy”
Mild sauce“Mild”
Mumbo sauce“Mild”

Scoville figures: each row links back to the page it was read from on where we got it. A style's rung comes from its own record.

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