Eating chilli sauces and the burning sensation on your tongue are permanently interlinked; you can't have one without the other. But there's a fine line between nicely spicy, and unpleasantly painful. UK electrochemists are now offering help to the food industry and chilli lovers, using carbon nanotubes in a more accurate technique for measuring the strength of hot sauces. Richard Compton and his team at the University of Oxford picked the electroanalytical technique adsorptive stripping voltammetry (AdsVS), and used multi-walled carbon nanotube based electrodes to adsorb capsaicinoids - the compounds that make chillies hot. By monitoring the capsaicinoids' electrochemical response, the team measured concentrations of the compounds in five commercially available sauces, ranging from the mild Tabasco Green Pepper sauce to the stupendously hot Mad Dog's Revenge.
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