I appreciate every ones post (But I still don't understand)What is extract and pure capsicum or even pure juice out of a fresh pepper (WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE) I mean how can a pepper be 10000 "scu" and I extract something from it and it becomes a (1 million 400 thousand "scu") I am just trying to understand all this ..I know I am dumb ..be patient with me ... I need it very plain..:-) Thanx Dave
Unfortunately, people use different terms to mean the same thing, and the same terms to mean different things...
Capsicum- this word refers to the genus of plants to which all hot peppers belong. It does not refer to pepper extract or a purified form of the chemicals that make peppers hot, though many people erroneously use it to refer to those...
Capsaicinoids - this is a class of chemicals that are responsible for creating much of the "hot" sensation in peppers and foods etc. Most simple pepper extracts will form a mix of several of these.
Capsaicin - this is one of many capsaicinoids, but is the most abundant and common of them. It is also supposed to be one of the hottest of them, and is the one credited with 16 million shu in its pure form. Many people just refer to capsaicin as if it is the sole contributor to heat in peppers, though this is not entirely accurate, but it does simplify discussion.
Concentration - its important to understand this concept if you are going to understand the rest. Imagine a cup of water and a spoon of salt. You can pour one spoonfull of salt into that water and it will be salty. You can pour another and it will be more salty. Capsaicin is like that salt. Add more of it to a sauce, a pepper, a meal, it will be more hot. You can add more of it by extracting it in some form and adding that extract, or you can add more of it by adding peppers that have a higher concentration of capsaicin than what you are adding them to...
Generally speaking, an
extract, whether it be capsaicinoids from peppers, alkaloids in other plants etc etc, is any form of something that is more highly concentrated than it was in its natural occurring form. So if you make coffee, then let it evaporate, then collect the resulting powder, you will have a product that could be called caffeine extract, since that powder has more caffeine per unit of mass than the original beans did. However, many different processes can be used to obtain higher purities in a given extract. Generally this is achieved by pulling the compound of interest out of raw material (ie pulling capsaicin out of raw peppers) using liquid chemicals that are very good at absorbing that compound.
For peppers, extractors often want to pull out the most pure version of capsaicin they can, and not too much of the other capsaicinoids, resulting in them using complex processes and several different other chemicals to separate the capsaicin from both plant matter and from the other capsaicinoids and alkaloids present in the peppers. However, there are many many different ways to go about extracting capsaicinoids or pure capsaicin from peppers, and not all methods are equal. Some may use nasty chemicals, some may use natural products etc.
So to answer your question as directly as I can... Pure capsaicin can be "extracted" from any pepper that contains it, whether it is a jalapeno or a cayenne, or a Butch T. The heat of the pepper generally just indicates how much capsaicin (and/or other capsaicinoids) are present within the flesh of that pepper. So you would need lots more jalapeno's to get 1 gram of pure capsaicin than you would need of Butch T's to get that same amount of pure capsaicin. From those peppers you could squeeze out the juice, which would contain some capsaicin in it, and may be more highly concentrated than the entire pepper. Or you could blend the pepper up with grain alcohol and strain out the liquid and evaporate it down to a small volume, which would be an "extract" that is more highly concentrated than the pepper and the juice both. Or you could process that product more and more with all sorts of different chemicals until you eventually are left with a very pure form of capsaicin.
