For yesterday’s dinner I had some Lincolnshire sausages left from a barbecue so I thought I’d make a hot sauce and have them with some pasta. On a recent trip to Tesco I’d stocked up on chillies, getting a couple of packs of the usual ‘red chillies’ which I believe to be Cayenne, some Bird’s Eye chillies and some I’d not seen before, the Dorset Naga. Now bearing in mind I eat quite a lot of chillies I think I can handle most of them. Having had a 7-pot chilli before and not having died I thought nothing more of it. Here is another Dorset Naga from the pack:
My sauce contained two sliced onions, a cayenne, a bird’s eye and a Dorset Naga, some cumin, 3 cloves of garlic (crushed), some coriander seeds, some black pepper and a tub of passata. It was at this point I read the packaging and noticed that Tesco had labelled this with 6 chillies out of a possible 5 (!?) on their heat scale. I had to eat a slice. Well that was an experience that I would not recommend to the non-chilli-tolerant.
I had my dinner, pasta, sausages and three tablespoons full of my sauce. I actually needed a shower afterwards-no light glow on the cheekbones from this meal! Upon further reading, the Dorset Naga has been measured in at 1.6 million Scoville Heat Units, which I believe makes it the hottest chilli known to man. Bear in mind that the pure chemical responsible for the burn, capsaicin, measures at 16 million SHU, only ten times more…
