Scoville Blend Calculator
Mixing peppers in a mash? Enter each variety and its weight to estimate the blended Scoville Heat Units (SHU) of the finished mix.
Estimated blend heat
How the estimate works
A hot sauce or salsa mash is rarely a single pepper — most recipes blend two or three varieties for flavor as well as heat. The finished heat of that blend sits at the weight-weighted average of every pepper that went in: 100 g of jalapeño (about 5,000 SHU) and 50 g of habanero (about 250,000 SHU) produce a blend closer to 65,000 SHU, not a simple average of the two ratings, because the jalapeño makes up two-thirds of the total weight.
This is the same reasoning food scientists use to predict a blended product’s pungency from its recipe, and it’s a useful sanity check before you commit a big batch of peppers to a ferment or a simmer.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is the blended Scoville rating of a chili mix calculated?
It's a weight-weighted average: multiply each pepper's SHU by how much of it (by weight) you're using, add those up, then divide by the total weight of all the peppers in the mix. A little of a very hot pepper barely moves the needle if it's blended into a large batch of a milder one, and vice versa.
Why use weight instead of just counting peppers?
Pepper sizes vary enormously — a habanero and a bell pepper are not close to the same mass. Weighing what actually goes into the pot is what determines how much capsaicin ends up in the final mash, so the blend estimate is based on weight, not pepper count.
Why might my sauce taste hotter or milder than the estimate?
Scoville ratings are themselves a range, not a fixed number — heat varies with the individual plant, ripeness, growing conditions, and how much seed and pith (where most of the capsaicin concentrates) makes it into the mash. Treat the estimate as a useful starting point, not a lab result.
Educational estimate only, based on commonly cited midpoint Scoville values. Real pepper heat varies with the plant, ripeness, and growing conditions — this is not a substitute for lab pungency testing.