My peri peri page used to say African bird’s eye chillies run 60,000 to 100,000 on the Scoville scale, and that they are roughly twenty times hotter than a jalapeno. I went looking for where those numbers came from, to check them. I could not find a source for any of it.
What I found instead is five published ranges that disagree with each other by a factor of seven, and not one of them saying where its figure came from.
The five ranges
| Source | Type | Range given | Cites a source? |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChiliPepperMadness | enthusiast site | 100,000 to 225,000 SHU | No |
| Wikipedia (Piri piri) | encyclopaedia | 50,000 to 175,000 SHU | Not shown |
| PepperScale | enthusiast site | 50,000 to 100,000 SHU | No |
| Chili-Plants.com | growers site | 30,000 to 100,000 SHU | No |
| ScovilleRepublic | seed and spice retailer | 165,000 to 190,000 SHU | Not checked directly |
| A standard food science reference | reference text, species level | 30,000 to 50,000 SHU for C. frutescens | Not visible from the page |
None of them cites anything
That is the finding. These are not five readings from five labs that happen to differ. They are five numbers presented as fact with no paper, no extension service, no lab result and no methodology behind any of them. Several appear in fast-facts boxes of the kind that get copied from site to site.
The low ends run from 30,000 to 165,000. The high ends run from 100,000 to 225,000. There is no overlap at all between the mildest published range and the hottest one.
The multiplier falls apart too
“Twenty times hotter than a jalapeno” sounds precise and is not. Both halves of that comparison are wide bands, so the answer depends entirely on which pair of endpoints you choose. Taking the published ranges and dividing them gives anything from 5 times to 40 times. PepperScale, which is itself one of the sources, says 6 to 40.
Part of it is that two different chillies share a name
“Bird’s eye chilli” covers at least two plants. The Thai bird’s eye is Capsicum annuum. The African bird’s eye, the peri peri chilli, is Capsicum frutescens, a different species. Sources routinely quote a figure for one under the name of the other.
That also explains an apparent contradiction with the reference book I use for cooking science, which gives Capsicum frutescens as a species at 30,000 to 50,000. It is not disagreeing with the higher cultivar figures so much as measuring a different thing: a species-level range against claims about particular hot cultivars.
What I changed
I widened the range on my peri peri page, hedged it, dropped the twenty times claim, and added a line saying which chilli is meant, because “bird’s eye” on its own does not tell you. A number nobody can source should not be printed as a fact, and it had been on my page for a long time.
If anyone knows of an actual measured figure for African bird’s eye, with a method attached, I would genuinely like to see it.
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