If you throw a whole hot pepper in a pot of soup and simmer it awhile, the whole pot of soup tastes spicy-hot, so it must be water-soluble.

edited

This post was edited by ottawapepper on Wed, Sep 11, 13 at 7:44

Actually, it MUST be water soluble. Isn't the Scoville scale based on the # of drops of WATER that it takes to make the heat dissipate to zero?

I imagine there's also other things at work chemically in your case...ions and such, hydrophobic and hydrophilic properties, etc.

Kevin

Oh pooh, that must be why the hot sauce I tried to make was nondescript. Watered down.....

Capsaicin in it's purest form is hydrophobic and repels water.

It doesn't bind with water, but it can be...in a way..."broken up into smaller pieces" and become surrounded by water molecules. They don't become part of a solution, but they become a mixture that's broken up and suspended in between water molecules. So it can spread around in a mixture and do it's thing even though it's technically not reacting with things forming new compounds/molecules.

A main component of capsaicin is a large chain piece of a fatty acid...which gives it it's main hydrophobic qualities.

The main "burn" qualities of the capsaicin comes from the compound attached to this large chain of fatty acid...and it burns because that compound binds tightly to receptors in humans (and other animals with these receptors...which birds do not have and therefore don't feel the "burn").

Interesting!

Tim

I figured that in soup there is always oil floating around looking for bits of nuclear fuel to dissolve. In pickles not so much. There are however plenty of ions that could form a transport layer (geek talk, not chemist talk).

Whatever, I do like my hot pickles. Heat really goes with the acid and sweet components. Now I have to buy a new jar every couple weeks. Hmmm.. How many calories in pickles? [rhetorical question]

Dennis

I thought capsacin was strongly alcohol soluble, which would make it weakly water and fat soluble. Which would be why alcohol works best for getting it off skin and coincidentally goes best with spicy food.

DM, the vinegar in the B & B pickles will cut the oil.

And the Scoville scale was based on sugar water, I believe.

Josh

so here's my question. lately I've been bottling hot sauces, and boiling the heck outta them before bottling. I've noticed they're coming out not as hot as expected, a more drastic effect than what can be explained by the vinegar alone. as I am cooking it, I get that "I just inhaled hot sauce" feeling. is that capsaicin from the sauce being evaporated into the air, making my sauce not as hot as it should be? for reference I boil my sauces at 200f.

Capsaicin acts like an oil/fat...sorta/kinda/practically-for-the-most-part....

If you've ever boiled any high-fat meat and stick your hand above the boiling water you'll notice that you'll get a kinda oily sheen and slick feeling on your hand. The fat/oil/etc particles aren't binding with the water...but they are being surrounded by water particles and lifting out into the atmosphere. It's generally a negligible amount, but it happens. Just like concentrated areas of capsaicin can disperse in water and spread itself around by being trapped between water molecules, it can also evaporate out in steam.

Peppers contain a good amount of water as well as capsaicin, so not even adding them anything and cooking them can also release the "burn" in a similar manner.

Depending on how long you boil them...and especially if not agitated/stirred constantly (and before a boil is achieved) to disperse the "oil" through out the mixture...it can rise to the top and be more easily evaporated since these lighter molecules tend to "float" toward the top of the suspension.

That said, I can't give you a percentage or amount lost through this process...nor do I know much about the difference between water vs vinegar hold on the capsaicin.

On the matter of sugar water/milk and capsaicin for heat determination...

Sugar water and milk both compete for the "burn" receptor sites in humans (and most animals). It's the sugar in the water, more than the water, that can displace/compete for these receptor sites.

That said, once out-competed for these sites, the capsaicin isn't neutralized (because it doesn't react to turn into a new substance/molecule/compound/etc). It's returned to the solution you're drinking and it's just as "burn-ready"...so while you may be removing the "burn" from your tongue, it's still able to be picked up by receptors further down the digestive system (throat/etc).

So...as far as determining heat dilution, sugar water can act as a subjective human buffer of sorts for figuring out how much sugar water is needed to be mixed with a certain pepper in order to figure out at what point the burn becomes negligible.

This post was edited by nc-crn on Thu, Sep 12, 13 at 17:03