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Q: Dear Fellow Hothead, How do manufacturers extract the capsaicin from the pepper to make a hot sauce hotter than a habanero? Matthew Michel A: Hello Matthew: Hot red chile peppers are dried, ground, and pelletized. They are treated with hexane, a petroleum distillate that acts as a solvent, and the result is oleoresin capsicum, a thick, reddish oil. The oil is heated to release all the hexane, which is distilled and reused. The spent chile pellets are sold as cattle feed. The oleoresin is refined to remove the oil, and the result is a crystalline powder called capsaicin. Simply put, what is happening is refining. By removing all components that are not capsaicin, you are left with pure capsaicin. An analogy would be sugar. You start off with sugar cane, and through refining you remove everything that is not sugar, and you are left with pure sugar.
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