Why it is called the ghost pepper

Bhut Jolokia is the Assamese name, and "ghost pepper" is the English name it picked up when the pepper became famous in the mid-2000s. Jolokia means the chili pepper. Bhut is the word that gets argued about. The common translation is ghost, a name that fits the way the heat creeps up a long moment after the bite. One account says Bhut originally pointed to the Bhutia traders who carried the pepper along old trade routes from Bhutan, and that the ghost reading is a later mistranslation. Both stories are in circulation, and we do not know which is right.

One pepper, many names

The pepper comes from the hill country of northeastern India, in Assam, Nagaland and Manipur. Each place has its own name for it. In Assam it is Bhut Jolokia, and also Bih Jolokia, which translates as poison chili. In Nagaland it is Raja Mircha or Naga Mircha, the king chili, and the Angami name Chüdi is translated as king of hotness. In Manipur it is Umorok.

Nagaland's king chili carries a Geographical Indication under Indian law, registered in 2008, which ties the name Naga Mircha to peppers grown in that state. By one account it was the first product from Nagaland to receive one.

How it became famous

For most of its history this was a local pepper, grown and eaten in the Northeast, where farmers have long smeared chili paste on fences to keep wild elephants off their crops.

Seed collected in India reached the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University in 2001. In a 2005 field trial at Las Cruces the pepper measured 1,001,304 Scoville heat units by HPLC, against 248,556 for Red Savina grown beside it. At the time, Guinness World Records listed Red Savina as the hottest pepper at 577,000. The trial was published in the journal HortScience in 2007, and the ghost pepper became the first pepper to pass a million Scoville units in a published trial. Its genetic markers suggested it was not a pure Capsicum chinense but carried some Capsicum frutescens in its background, which would make it a natural cross between two species rather than a bred variety.

The title did not last. Hotter peppers followed within a few years, among them the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion and the Carolina Reaper. What is the hottest pepper in the world has that history, and How hot is a Carolina Reaper, really? has our own Reaper results.

The ghost in the heat

Whatever the name's origin, the ghost reading has stuck for a reason. The ghost pepper does not hit at once. There is a window after the bite, often described as fifteen to forty-five seconds, where the flavor is sweet and a little smoky and nothing else happens. Then the heat comes up, slowly, and keeps coming, and settles in for a long time. People who taste it for the first time describe being ambushed. That is the ghost.

What ours tested at

We sell nine ghost grinders with a lab result, and a tenth that is estimated. Our numbered ghost, no. 5 Ghost, tested at 417,166 Scoville units. The three in the Ghost Kit tested at 527,676 for Red Ghost, 360,498 for Green Ghost and 285,998 for Yellow Ghost. None of our lots reached the 1,001,304 of the New Mexico trial, and our ghost pepper page says why that gap is normal. The ghost pepper family ranks all of them.

Questions people ask

What does Bhut Jolokia mean? Jolokia is the Assamese word for chili pepper. Bhut is usually translated as ghost. One account traces it instead to the Bhutia traders who dealt in the pepper.

Is the ghost pepper the same as the Naga chili? Naga Mircha, Raja Mircha and Bhut Jolokia are names for the same pepper from different parts of northeastern India. Nagaland's name for it is the one with the Geographical Indication.

Was the ghost pepper ever the hottest pepper in the world? Yes. It was the first pepper to pass 1,000,000 Scoville units in a published trial, grown in 2005 and published in 2007, and hotter peppers followed within a few years.

Sources

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