Hot Sauce Scoville Blend Calculator

The Scoville scale measures the heat of peppers and hot sauces by quantifying capsaicin concentration. It was invented in 1912 by American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in the United States.

Scoville ratings of common hot sauces and peppers:

Sorted mildest to hottest, which is the order you want when you are trying to place something you have never tried:

Two things in that table catch people out. A bottle of habanero sauce is nowhere near a habanero pepper: Tabasco’s habanero sauce is about 7,000 SHU because the pepper is a small part of a bottle that is mostly vinegar and fruit. And Da Bomb, the one that keeps reducing people to tears on chat shows, is not the outlier its reputation suggests. At roughly 135,600 SHU it lands inside the range of an ordinary fresh habanero, toward the lower end of it. What makes it brutal is that the heat comes from concentrated extract rather than whole peppers, and extract heat arrives faster and sits differently on the palate than the number alone predicts.

Note the overlap that creates: fresh habaneros span such a wide range that a mild one is milder than Da Bomb and a hot one is more than twice as fierce. The table is ordered by the bottom of each range, which is why the habanero row comes first.

Blending formula:

When mixing two hot sauces by volume, the heat of the blend is a weighted average:

Blended SHU = (Volume A × SHU A + Volume B × SHU B) ÷ (Volume A + Volume B)

Working backwards from a target:

Most of the time you are not asking “what will this come to”, you are asking “how much of the hot one do I add”. Fill in the optional target field and the calculator rearranges the formula for you:

Fraction of hot sauce = (Target − Mild SHU) ÷ (Hot SHU − Mild SHU)

With Cholula at 1,000 SHU and a habanero sauce at 100,000, aiming for 10,000 gives (10,000 − 1,000) ÷ (100,000 − 1,000) = 0.0909, so a little over 9% of the finished bottle is the hot one. Against 100 ml of Cholula that is about 10 ml of habanero. The target has to sit between your two sauces, since blending cannot take you outside them.

Heat perception is logarithmic — a sauce at 10,000 SHU doesn’t taste exactly twice as hot as 5,000 SHU. Your palate adapts, so always taste-test after blending before adjusting.

Tips for blending:

• Start with small amounts: it’s hard to dilute if you add too much heat
• Capsaicin is fat-soluble and barely dissolves in water, which is why milk or yogurt kills the burn and a glass of water just moves it around
• Let blended sauces rest for 30 minutes so flavors meld before final tasting
• Acidity (vinegar) can intensify perceived heat, even without more capsaicin