“Do you like hot things?” my co-worker asked with a sly grin.
I do like hot things, to an extent. I like spicy salsa and wasabi, but I can’t handle “burn your face off” hot.
For the record, “Cocoa Loco” is “burn your face off” hot. And then some.
Cocoa Loco, made by the Pucker Butt Pepper Company, is a small square of chocolate infused with Black Reaper pepper sauce.
For those unfamiliar, allow me to explain “Scoville” heat rankings to you. The Scoville chart measures how hot things are in Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). Think of the hottest jalapeno that’s ever burned your mouth. Jalapenos have an average SHU rating of 5,000. Habanero peppers, which many people claim is the hottest thing they’ve ever consumed, start around 200,000 SHUs. At one million SHU, the Bhut Jolokia pepper was once considered to be the hottest pepper on the planet until the arrival of the Carolina Reaper, which measures 1.5 million SHU. There are a ton of videos on YouTube of people eating Carolina Reapers. Almost all of them end with tears, vomit, or both. The video by these kids is one of my favorites. Seemed like a good idea at the time!
So, back to Cocoa Loco, and the Black Reaper pepper. It’s 2.2 million SHU, or roughly 40% hotter than the Carolina Reaper.
And no, I did not want to eat that — in chocolate, or otherwise.
Instead of eating the entire bar, I compromised and had a small sample — and by small, I literally mean the size of a freckle. The basis of comparison I’ve been using is, the piece of chocolate I tried was roughly the same size as a single pebble of beef from a Taco Bell taco. It was tiny. My friend Tim and I (and later, our friend Emily) all had pieces the same size. For me, the heat was intense, and immediate. First, my mouth caught on fire — and then the back of my throat, followed by the back of my head, and then my ears. The intense heat lasted roughly five minutes, but I continued to sweat and feel hot for a full fifteen minutes.
$5 from each $20 spent goes toward prostate cancer, although while sampling the chocolate I couldn’t help but wonder if the Black Reaper wouldn’t burn any cancerous cells (and everything else) right out of a person’s body.
If you want to support this cause and like really, really hot things, give Cocoa Loco a try. If you just like watching other people suffer, you can search YouTube for #ChocoChallenge and watch other people try the bar.
Perhaps eating it live on air isn’t the best idea.
