Our ingredient of the week is cayenne pepper. We recently added this ingredient when we got an e-mail from a customer who was looking to put something more spicy on her custom chocolate bars. Again, thanks for the suggestion. Although we thought this was a little unusual at first (not as unusual as bacon) once we taste tested it, we were actually really excited about how great it tastes.

For those of you who don't know, Cayenne is a red hot chilli pepper named after the city Cayenne in French Guiana. The Cayenne is dried and then ground into a fine powder which is added to dishes to provide flavor and spice. It is rated around 30,000 to 50,000 Scoville units.

What are Scoville units? The Scoville scale is a way to measure the spiciness of a certain food. It is named after the American chemist Wilbur Scoville who figured out that capsaicin, a chemical compound, stimulates the nerve endings in a certain manner that causes the eater to feel spiciness. Scoville units are a measure of the amount of capsaicin in a certain food and hence its spiciness. To give you an idea of what the units signify, police grade pepper spray ranks around 5 million on the Scoville scale and Jalapeño peppers rank around 2500 Scoville units.

We definitely recommend you try the cayenne pepper in your next Chocomize chocolate bar. If you have any other ingredients you don't see listed on our website, shoot us an e-mail at info@Chocomize.com and we'll be sure to add them to the list. Who knows, maybe if you're lucky your ingredient could be the next ingredient of the week!