Ed Currie is a South Carolina pepper developer who came up with the Carolina Reaper. That insanely hot thing registered at 1.64 million on the Scoville rating scale. “Pepper X” got jacked all the way up to 2.693 million Scoville Heat Units by cross-breeding the Carolina Reaper with another pepper.
Freshly certified as a new world record by Guinness, Currie took his talents to the iconic Hot Ones YouTube channel and joined a pepper-eating madman named Chili Klaus as the first to ever consume a whole “Pepper X.” You can see the full breakdown and reactions below.
Hot Ones host Sean Evans took a mere sliver of Pepper X. Dude can take some serious heat when he eats those wings with increasingly hot sauce whilst interviewing celebrities. Evans was no match for this, nor should anyone be.
Since that fateful day where Currie consumed his abominable-but-brilliant-I-guess (?) creation, he’s been making the rounds in the media.
…And revealed that it took him 3.5 hours to no longer feel the heat from that whole Pepper X.
This man is saying, “I highly recommend you do not do it” when it comes to eating a Carolina Reaper. And here he was, eating “Pepper X”, which is essentially a Carolina Reaper on steroids.
How about what Currie told NBC News about that fateful Hot Ones episode:
“After he finished recording the ‘Hot Ones’ episode in New York City, Currie said, he walked only 10 feet out of his car before he collapsed.
“‘I laid down on a marble wall in the rain and groaned in pain for about an hour,” he said. “A couple of my friends helped me get up to my room, and they gave me some ice cream, which just caused the cramps to happen again.'”
NBC also said Pepper X is hotter than law enforcement-grade pepper spray (up to two million SHU).
I’m shook. I don’t know what would possess him to push his body, mind and soul that far. I don’t care what your tolerance is. Your body is going to basically shut down, as Currie puts it, trying to combat what it thinks is literal poison. Might as well be!
Story time: In high school, my friends convinced me to eat a whole habanero pepper. That only gets up to 350,000 on the Scoville counter. After about 30 minutes, I was sprawled out in the back seat of a car, on the verge of passing out, mucus uncontrollably coming out my nose and mouth…just a mess. Disaster, master. My buddies sprinted into a White Castle to grab me a Sprite, which I half-consciously crushed through a straw. I came back into my body another 10 minutes later.
We’re talking about a Pepper X thing here that’s roughly, what, nine times hotter than that? WTF, man. Double-you. Tee. Eff.
I’m not usually like a competitive eating fanatic or someone who enthusiastically covers Joey Chestnut’s disgusting prowess over hot dogs every Fourth of July, but it takes a certain kind of biological marvel/borderline athlete to have the literal intestinal fortitude to scarf down a Pepper X.
Nothing but respect for Ed Currie. Well, sort of. I would stay as far away from him as humanly possible if I were to ever see him in the flesh. A soft waft of his breath might be enough secondhand heat to knock me out on my feet. Beyond that, perhaps he’d try to get me to have “just a taste” of one of his sick peppers. No thanks, sir. No thanks.
