How The Wings On Hot Ones Are Actually Prepared

How much do you love Hot Ones? A show where celebrities (except for Joe Rogan) sweat, struggle, and spill the beans on the craziest interview questions while being challenged to consume an increasingly spicier variety of hot wings... such a genius concept that even the worst episodes of this popular YouTube series are still a guilty pleasure.

Not only is Hot Ones fun to watch, but it also makes a great idea for a themed party — at least, if your friends are up to the challenge (and you've maybe got a tiny streak of sadism). It doesn't even matter if your friends aren't meat-eaters — several guests on Hot Ones have been offered vegan wings. Bake them, fry them, that doesn't matter — the wings here are just a vehicle for the heat, and the secret to preparing perfect Hot Ones-worthy wings lies in selecting and applying your sauces.

If you want to see all of the different sauces that have been used on Hot Ones up through Season 11, Australian hot sauce seller Sauce Mania has helpfully compiled a list. While several seasons have started off with relatively mild sauces of under 1,000 Scoville units (for comparison, Huy Fong Sriracha — which they've also used — has 2,200 units), the hottest sauces have over 1 million. 

In fact, the hottest sauce of all, The Last Dab, was produced especially for Hot Ones, and comes in at an absolutely insane 2 million+ Scoville units. This sauce is available from Heatonist, but it's pretty pricey at $20 a bottle, and the website warns that there's a limit of two per customer.

The Hot Ones sauce application method was carefully designed to ensure maximum sauce application to every part of the wing. Saucing is done by production manager Domonique Burroughs, who revealed to The Verge the secret technique she learned from show creator Chris Schonberger. 

How she does it is, she pours hot sauce into a plastic bowl, places another bowl on top to make a clamshell-type enclosure, and then shake-shake-shakes until the wings are all sauced up. That is how Hot Ones has prepped its wings since the beginning, and that is how they intend to keep on saucing them, no matter what advice they might receive from celebrity kibbitzers including the notorious Gordon Ramsay.