Guy Fieri's Close Call With This Spicy Dish Made Him Grab A Pineapple For Relief

Celebrity chefs tend to be a bit more adventurous about trying new foods than the average Joe, but the legendary Guy Fieri takes it to a whole new level. He's perhaps most famous for his "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" program, where he samples local cuisine from chefs all across the country. It sounds like a dream job to many folks — that is, until they watch him squirm trying some of the dishes. One such occasion took place in Hawaii as Fieri visited a Jamaican/Hawaiian fusion joint helmed by chef and owner Caswell "Cassie" Simmonds, who made sure the Food Network star got a taste of heat.

As Simmonds was demonstrating how he made his signature jerk marinade, he described the main feature of the dish as "fire in your wire" hot sauce (via Dailymotion). I'm not going to dig into what that might mean, but he mentioned that it contained a whole lot of heat from the Chilean, Hawaiian, Scotch bonnet, and ghost peppers. And while Fieri tends to steer clear of ghost peppers, he couldn't help himself from adding another tragic chapter to his life by dipping his pinky in and giving it a taste.

It didn't take long for his facial expression to turn from a jovial demeanor to a look that conveyed intense discomfort. As he coughed and wheezed, he reached for the nearest thing available in an attempt to quell the fiery sensation taking over his palate: a whole pineapple. Fieri took a generous bite with tears in his eyes while Simmonds looked on, giggling. The heat eventually subsided, and Fieri confirmed why he doesn't typically eat ghost pepper-based dishes in the first place.

While there is no way of knowing the amount of ghost pepper in Cassie Simmonds' sauce, it doesn't take much to make an unforgettable impact on your taste buds. Capsaicin is the chemical responsible for giving peppers their fiery kick, and the Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) scale measures the amount of capsaicin to help people identify which are hot and which are a bit tamer. A bell pepper, for example, registers a zero on the SHU scale. Toward the other end of the scale, a ghost pepper tallies a whopping 948,000 Scoville Heat Units on average. They can be as high as 1,041,427 SHU.

Ghost peppers weren't the only culprit behind the blaze that made Fieri take a healthy bite out of a pineapple to find some relief. Scotch bonnets were also incorporated into the spicy sauce, and they weigh in at an average of 225,000 SHU. That's some serious heat, but as hot as these peppers are, they aren't something most folks should fear.

Some people can experience dangerous side effects from eating them, like heart attacks and seizures, but it's not common. And one would have to consume a heroic amount of hot peppers for it to kill them. Still, as Guy Fieri quickly found out, it only takes a little bit to elicit a fierce reaction that will have you reaching for the nearest glass of milk — or a pineapple.