How Hot The Last Dab From Hot Ones Really Is

Do you ever watch Hot Ones and feel like you could stand up pretty well under the heat? If you're a real hothead, you're probably not too impressed with some of the introductory sauces. After all, some of the level ones and twos have included such familiar grocery store condiments as Texas Pete, Cholula, Tapatio, and Huy Fong Sriracha, stuff that's mild enough for any given kindergartner to handle. However, as everyone knows, the whole premise of the show involves turning up the heat until both host and celebrity guest are squirming and sweating, with heads that look like they're ready to explode.

The first three seasons made use of some of the hottest sauces on the market at the time, with the best — or worst — of these being Blair's Mega Death Sauce, with a not-so-shabby 550,000 Scoville units (via Sauce Mania). What's a Scoville unit? They are used on a scale that measures the "heat" of various different peppers. Oola shows the Bell Pepper at the bottom of the scale, with 0 Scoville units, and the hottest known pepper, Pepper X, checks in at a mind-melting 3,180,000 units. Starting with season four of Hot Ones, the producers decided to come up with their own sauce that would be the hottest of the hot. According to First We Feast, this sauce, which is made with that diabolical Pepper X, was named The Last Dab to honor the show's tradition of putting an extra dab of sauce on the last wing.

The Last Dab has 2 million-plus Scoville units, comparable to some pepper sprays. Serious stuff, right? Hot Ones guests seem to think so. Some who bought the sauce, though, have been less impressed. Reviews of The Last Dab mention how tasty it is — it's made with mustard, ginger root, coriander, and turmeric, and the flavor profile includes hints of chocolate and peach as well as pepper. Still, not everyone agrees with Heatonist's claim that the sauce rates 11 out of 10 for hotness. Reviews on the product page include comments such as "If you're accustomed to hot sauces, this won't blow your face off with heat," "upper medium heat with a few spikes here and there," "this stuff honestly isn't that hot," and "I've experienced hotter jalapenos. Underwhelming if that's all PepperX has to offer."

A Reddit thread about The Last Dab came to a similar consensus, finding the sauce to be delicious but only moderately hot. One possible explanation put forward was that The Last Dab gets its heat from actual peppers, whereas some of the hot-enough-to-cause-real-pain sauces are made with pepper extracts. Extract-based sauces may not have the same high Scoville count, but pepper extract is, as one Redditor put it, "like napalm. It sticks to your mouth." Whether or not you find The Last Dab all that hot, if you manage to taste it without whimpering, then you've survived the worst that Hot Ones can dish out.