Granted, my peppers were farmed in California, not India, but they should be well within an order of magnitude of its variety's rating.
Actually, they shouldn't necessarily. All chiles, are very sensitive to the environment they are grown in. Even trivial changes in temperature, humidity, and soil pH can affect the heat of the chile. The Naga Jolokia in particular can be at least as low as 500,000 Scoville units. The hottest one has been recorded at over 1 million. Many American growers intentionally grow them much milder than those found in India; this makes them much easier to sell.
The Scoville scale is a measure of capsaicin concentration. In other words, quantity of capsaicin per fixed volume. Originally, it was measured by a panel of five tasters who tasted a dilute solution of capsaicin oil which had been extracted from a fixed quantity of dried chile. The degree of dilution at which the capsaicin is undetectable is the Scoville rating.
Modern methods use high performance liquid chromatography to precisely the pungency units of a chile, this is equivalently the parts per million of capsaicin. Multiplying the pungency rating by 15 gives you the equivalent Scoville rating.
What does all this mean? Well, since it's a measure of concentration it's important to realize that by eating one chile or 20 chiles the concentration doesn't change. However, with more chiles you are exposing your mouth to a greater quantity of capsaicin. If this is what you mean by "intensity" then sure, it's more intense with an increase in volume. Personally I think of intensity as concentration instead of volume.
Those paragraphs should answer your question overall, but I'll go through your list just the same:
- The intensity is the Scoville rating. Again, intensity to me equates to concentration.
- The capsaicin is most concentrated in the seeds, so chewing them will release a greater quantity of it.
- Not that I am aware of.
- Not sure what you mean by cooked down, but yes both volume and concentration affect the quantity of capsaicin.
- A larger fruit of the same Scoville rating (concentration) will contain a larger amount of capsaicin.
- Yes, the capsaicin concentration is seven times greater.
- Yes that is a reasonable use.
I've never used bhut jolokias but I love spicy vegetable oil. DO NOT just throw the peppers in a jar of oil. Apparently this is bad. Follow the much more helpful links in the comments that follow this and make the oil properly.
Once you do this you can cook pretty much anything that needs a little (or a lot) of extra heat. You said you have other peppers so it might be interesting to set up a few jars with different pepper combos.
Bonus: if what I've heard of these peppers is correct, you can probably make a low grade mace this way.
If you're looking for something to do right away, I'd mix a very small piece in some melty cheese and throw it on some chips, burritos, pizza, or anything really. Spicy cheese rocks.
Good luck and enjoy.
Best Answer
As an overly broad generalization, yes, smaller peppers tend to be more spicy.
To answer in more detail, the heat in peppers comes from a molecule called capsaicin. The concentration of capsaicin is what determines how spicy peppers are relative to each other.
Incidentally, this is also how spiciness can be measured. The Scoville Scale is a measure of how many times you need to dilute the pepper's capsaicin before it is no longer detectable by taste. While this is subjective, it's a decent point for comparison between different varieties.
Larger peppers like bell peppers or banana peppers are low on the Scoville Scale (0 & up to 500 Scoville Heat Units respectively), while smaller peppers like Serranos (up to 25,000 SHU) and Habaneros (up to 350,000 SHU) are usually much hotter. Thus you have a trend with smaller peppers being hotter.
NB: Scoville units per pepper listed as 'up to xx', as there can be huge variations dependent on things like soil composition and climate. This is why you can get some Jalapenos that aren't terribly spicy, but then get others that are (relatively) really hot. SHU listings from Wikipedia.