Eating Hot Peppers For Fun And Glory

It’s 5 p.m. and the stage is set for the main event. The competitors are called out one by one and stare down a paper tray of chili peppers, the color of which are almost impossibly, brilliantly scarlet — like lipstick.

These are no ordinary peppers. They are Carolina Reapers, the world’s hottest, rated at about 1.5 million Scoville units, the standard measure of hotness. You read that right: million. Your average run-of-the-mill jalapeño is a few thousand.

My daughter and I are in Brooklyn for the fifth annual NYC Hot Sauce Expo, a celebration of all things hot. Specifically, to see my brother-in-law (her uncle), who’s come from California to defend his world record for most reapers eaten in a minute. You can look it up in the Guinness Book of World Records. Last year in Tempe, Ariz., Gregory Foster ate 120 grams of pure fire.

An official Guinness Book representative, looking like a prep school escapee with a blazer bearing the official insignia, explains the rules: 60 seconds, chew and swallow, whatever isn’t swallowed is spit out at the end of the minute and subtracted from the total weight eaten. Then the contestant must hold it down for another minute. Try not to think about it.

The first to go is a squat young man who happens to be wearing a T-shirt with my brother-in-law’s hot sauce brand logo on it: Inferno Farms. He chomps down one, two, three … all the way up to eight grim reapers. The packed crowd made up almost entirely of young people, including a tourist couple from Belgium standing next to us, cheers him on.

An emcee eggs him on: “Chew!” “Swallow!” “Faster!” And when the contestant is done: “How do you feel?” Did we hear a barely croaked-out “Hot”? Hard to tell. Finally the fried competitor is handed a can of whipped cream to squirt freely into his mouth. That takes away a bit of the edge. He disappears down a long tunnel. Enough said about that.

Greg doesn’t actually have to protect his record on this day. The winner of the competition, the guy who went first, weighs in at around 90 grams. Not even close. But the reigning champ does step up to the stage like a superhero and gives it a go. (Greg even looks like one: Mr. Incredible from “The Incredibles.”) Without the urgency, he taps out at seven peppers and doesn’t even place.

Hot sauce is seemingly the choice startup nowadays. It’s a thing. My brother-in-law began bottling his own a year ago, growing peppers in a small backyard garden and cooking in his home. The capacious Brooklyn Expo Center is wall-to-wall tables with endless bottles.

My daughter and I spend some time sampling a few of the wares at considerable peril. We make the discovery that if you try a really hot one first, the next few don’t feel as hot. Then she talks me into buying peppered-up beef jerky. Despite the word “reaper” printed right on the package, the salesman says it’s not too hot.

We each break off a piece no bigger than a fingernail. For the next five minutes, we are walking around trying not to fall down from the sensation. Luckily, at a hot sauce convention, having a conversation while tears are streaming down your face is considered acceptable behavior.

How does a human manage to consume even one raw Carolina Reaper? Yowza!