It is not difficult to tell these two peppers apart. After trying many hot sauces, we actually found that PuckerButt makes some of the best Carolina Reaper sauces out there. However, if you’re looking for a good Carolina Reaper sauce – look no further than the creator of the pepper himself. This is no pepper to mess with – it’s brutal! Most of the hot sauces we have that are made with Carolina Reaper peppers are a bit too spicy for us to enjoy on a regular basis. If you have ever tried a slice of raw Carolina Reaper, you may have briefly tasted the sweet flavor before the scorching heat came through. Still, it demands the use of proper nitrile gloves when slicing! The heat is a bit more tolerable (but still incredibly hot), so we find it is a slightly more ‘usable’ pepper in the kitchen. We love the sweet, floral-fruity flavor of all the ghost pepper varieties we grow. The ghost pepper pairs very well with different fruits and spices, making it a great pepper to make hot sauce with. This is because of the delicious, fruity flavor and intense heat. The ghost pepper is one of our favorite peppers to grow and cook with. There is no wonder they are the star ingredient in so many fiery hot sauces. The Carolina Reaper has been said to reach over 2 million SHUs on the Scoville scale, doubling the heat of the ghost pepper.īoth of these peppers pack a significant amount of heat. So, how hot is the Carolina Reaper in comparison? About double. Let’s compare that to the measly 5,000 SHUs of a jalapeno pepper! They are, however, larger in size than reapers, so eating a whole pepper would be seriously hot either way. Let’s get one thing straight – both of these peppers are incredibly hot! The ghost pepper used to be the hottest pepper in the world, before the Carolina Reaper took its place as the new Guinness record holder.Ĭlocking in at about 1 million SHUs, the ghost pepper will send most people straight to the milk. Ghost pepper and Carolina Reaper peppers. This unique pepper was actually the result of crossing a Pakistani Naga pepper and a Caribbean habanero pepper called La Soufrière. The Carolina Reaper was created by Ed Currie, the founder of The Puckerbutt Pepper Company. It is thought to be a natural cross between Capsicum chinense and Capsicum frutescens species. Originally from Northeast India, the ghost pepper (bhut jolokia) is one of our favorite peppers. In this article, I’ll share the similarities and differences between the ghost pepper and the Carolina Reaper pepper. But there is more to it than that – flavor, shape, plant size, and productivity.

If you’re just interested in heat, the Reaper is hotter, up to twice as hot, in fact. We’ve had the pleasure of growing and tasting both of these varieties over many seasons. Some may think these two peppers are similar, but they’re actually quite different. Every year, we have multiple ghost pepper and Carolina Reaper plants growing in our garden.

Carolina reaper pepper scovilles