Carolina Reaper. Pepper spray for your taste buds. A chili so hot farm workers don double latex gloves just to pick one.
The world’s hottest chili pepper is helping a Harrow pickling company bring the heat.
“Hotter. Hotter. I want something hotter. It’s not hot enough for me. Can you get anything hotter?” Lakeside Packing Company vice-president Alan Woodbridge said customers kept asking.
So the family-owned company southeast of Harrow not only started pickling the Carolina Reaper, it developed its own hot sauces. Death Wish. Butt Blaster. Scorpion Sting. Ex Wife’s Revenge. Spider Bite.
Woodbridge likes naming them more than taste-testing them. One sliver of a blistering red Carolina Reaper was enough for him.
“First you get the burning sensation in your mouth, your tongue and then it migrates to the back of your throat and you’re feeling your stomach and you start sweating profusely and gasping for air,” he said. “The pain lingers for hours.”
He tried to douse it with beer which was like adding gasoline to an inferno. He suggests milk, lots of milk.
Alan Woodbridge holds up the Butch T Trinidad Scorpian pepper, one of the hottest peppers known to man, at Lakeside Packing near Harrow on Friday, September 26, 2014. The pepper was said to be the hottest pepper in the world by Guinness World Records at almost 1.5 million Scoville heat units but it has since been dethroned by the Carolina Reaper which Woodbridge also grows. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
Some of the various hot sauces and peppers grown and produced at Lakeside Packing are seen near Harrow on Friday, September 26, 2014. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
Some of the various hot sauces and peppers grown and produced at Lakeside Packing are seen near Harrow on Friday, September 26, 2014. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
The Carolina Reaper is the hottest chili in the world according to www.guinnessworldrecords.com and has an average of more than 1.5 million Scoville heat units. Under the Scoville scale to rate the heat or spiciness, a bell pepper is a zero and a jalapeno is more than 8,000 heat units. Online charts put pepper spray at two million Scoville heat units or more.
Lakeside also pickles whole ghost peppers (Bhut Jolokia) and the Butch T Trinidad Scorpion which is another hybrid that only a few years ago was considered the world’s hottest chili at close to 1.5 million Scoville heat units.
Woodbridge suspects many try the peppers on a dare. He laughs as he describes his market as “absolutely insane and nuts, someone who wants something I guess to punish themselves.”
Because the really hot stuff is sold through a distributor mostly to Toronto specialty stores, he’s not sure where to find the hot sauces other than the County Road 50 plant, for now. He’d like to get them in stores where other Lakeside products such as hot pepper rings, pickles, sauerkraut, pasta sauces and relishes are sold. Lakeside has about 100 different products and exports to 14 different countries.
His grandfather Charles Woodbridge founded Lakeside in 1948 and started pickling surplus hot and sweet banana peppers for European immigrants. Later the company was pickling cherry peppers and jalapeno peppers, which grow well here in the humidity and then moved up to habaneros. The family only started growing the super hot chilis in the last few years.
The harvest of his small plot of Carolina Reapers was already finished by Friday and he didn’t have any pickled ones left.
Even when the milder hot banana peppers are being sliced at the plant, workers have to wear masks and long sleeves. Woodbridge said there’s sweating and coughing and it feels like the worst head cold you’ve ever had.
As a kid, he wore gloves in the plant but some nights still had to sleep with his burning hands in ice water.
“Some of them scare me,” Woodbridge said of the trending mega hot chilis.
The company’s bestselling hot sauce is still its original which is easier to find in stores. Lakeside sells its line of specialty hot sauces at its 667 County Road 50 east plant for under $5 per bottle.
shill@windsorstar.com or @winstarhill on Twitter
Some of the various hot sauces and peppers grown and produced at Lakeside Packing are seen near Harrow on Friday, September 26, 2014. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
Some of the various hot sauces and peppers grown and produced at Lakeside Packing are seen near Harrow on Friday, September 26, 2014. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
Some of the various hot sauces and peppers grown and produced at Lakeside Packing are seen near Harrow on Friday, September 26, 2014. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
Some of the various hot sauces and peppers grown and produced at Lakeside Packing are seen near Harrow on Friday, September 26, 2014. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
