Hot record

A woman from India's north-east hopes to set a new record by eating a massive quantity of a pepper which is 100 times hotter than a jalapeno.

The world record was set by South African Anita Crafford, who ate eight jalapenos in a minute in 2002.

But the scorching Bhut Jolokia, or ghost chilli pepper, is about 100 times as hot as a jalapeno.

Anandita Dutta Tamuly, a 26-year-old mother, is headed from Assam to London at the invitation of the Guinness Records institution to see how many Bhut Jolokia peppers she can eat at one sitting.

Ms Tamuly, who hails from a remote village where the pepper grows, believes she will have little trouble in beating the previous record.

She says she got hooked on the peppers as a small girl when her mother smeared chilli paste on her tongue to cure an infection.

"I have already created history on Indian television by munching 60 of the chillies in two minutes -- I am more than confident of creating a record once I reach London," she said.

The pepper, brought to Guinness's attention by a horticulture professor at New Mexico State University, clocks slightly more than one million Scoville units, almost twice as hot as the previous reigning champ, the Red Savina habanero at about 580,000 units.

The Scoville scale, developed by a pharmacist in 1912, is a measure of the ratio of water required to neutralise the pungency of a chilli pepper.

An average jalapeno, used widely in salsa, measures only about 10,000 heat units.

The university announced this February that Guinness had recognised the pepper's claim to being the world's hottest and as news of the record trickled down in Assam, where the hybrid variety occurs naturally, canny vegetable sellers raised their prices.

"We never thought Bhut Jolokia was so hot until news came in that this is the world's hottest chilli," Nalini Ram Thakuria, a vegetable vendor in Assam said.

"Now we have hiked the price by 50 rupees ($US1.1 dollars) a kilogram with people buying it like hot cakes."

A kilogram of the pepper now sells for about 250 rupees.