Gene Olczak owns Karma Sauce, a Perinton-based hot sauce company. When he had a hard time sourcing locally grown hot peppers, he bought a farm in Bristol, Ontario County. (September 2017) Jamie Germano
The scene: Actress Taraji P. Henson sits at a table, a chicken wing coated in hot sauce in front of her. The actress known for roles including Cookie on the television show Empire and Katherine Johnson in the film Hidden Figures sniffs it suspiciously.
"This smells hot, and it made the chicken grow hair," she says, examining it closely. "I don't trust it." With suspenseful music playing, she takes a bite and pauses to feel the effect.
Her reaction makes it evident that she feels it quickly. "That's going to burn," she says emphatically, and bends over to spit it out, out of view of the camera. But her exclamations indicate that the sauce lingers.
She taps out of the spicy chicken wing challenge, earning herself a spot on the Hall of Shame of the viral YouTube show "Hot Ones."
Now in its fifth season, it is a talk show with "hot questions and even hotter wings." Host Sean Evans chats with celebrities like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Terry Crews as they nibble on chicken wings coated with increasingly incendiary sauces. Other past guests: Russell Brand, Guy Fieri, Andy Cohen, Tom Arnold, Seth Rogen, Steve-O, Kevin Durant, Wanda Sykes and more. The show's YouTube channel, First We Feast, has more than 2.5 million subscribers.
The show has become a phenomenon around the world, said Noah Chaimberg, co-owner of Heatonist, a hot sauce shop with locations in Brooklyn and Chelsea Market in New York City. The show's avid audience, which includes a high percentage of young adult men, tunes in religiously. People have been known to organize parties to taste along with the show. New episodes, with surprise celebrity guests, air at 11 a.m. Thursdays.
The sauce that did Henson in: Extreme Karma, from Perinton sauce company Karma Sauce. It is the fifth hottest of 10 hot sauces that will be featured throughout the show's fifth season.
Whereas some hot sauces can be unpalatable and unpleasant, owner and sauce creator Gene Olczak strives to bring the flavor along with the heat. Extreme Karma is based on a mixture of sweet potatoes and butternut squash for balance and restraint. But he admits that the vast majority of the public will find its heat level hard to take. The mildest peppers in the mix are the famed ghost peppers.
“You’re not going to put that on your corn flakes,” he said.
Selecting the sauces for the show starts with the people at Heatonist. They recommend a lineup based on a what's new and interesting, and also meets the show's requirement of an increasing heat level. The show's producers ultimately decide what is featured.
Heatonist selected Extreme Karma because it is natural and includes unique ingredients, Chaimberg said.
“We love to support people like Gene who have an incredible amount of passion for what they do," he said. The shop also has worked with Olczak on a fennel and strawberry habañero sauce, carried exclusively by the shop.
Since Extreme Karma debuted on "Hot Ones," the company is on track to reach its 2017 sales mark within the first month of 2018, Olczak said. He is feverishly working to keep up with the skyrocketing demand.
Until early January, Olczak worked at Harris Corporation on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, and ran his business in his spare time. When his work on the space telescope wound down, he left Harris to focus on the sauce company.
More: Harris scientists complete work on James Webb Space Telescope
Making Karma sauces is a time-intensive endeavor, because he grows the hot peppers and other produce at his farm in Bristol, Ontario County. He produces the sauces in his microfactory, one-car wide and 1½ cars deep, in the garage of his Perinton home. (The 325-square-foot facility has professional food processing equipment, is licensed by the state, and is inspected annually by the same department that inspects large facilities like the LiDestri plant in Fairport.)
More: Hot sauce maker packs western New York heat in a bottle
The increased demand has meant that he has quickly outgrown his facility, if only because it doesn't have a loading dock. He now faces the task of packing the sauce into boxes, loading them into the back of his car, transporting them to a shipping facility, loading 1500 pounds at a time onto pallets and wrapping it all for shipping. He is on the hunt for a new facility.
The show also has meant a modification of his business strategy. Olczak grew an abundance of hot peppers last year to sell at wholesale. He has had to suspend that effort, because needs the peppers for the Karma sauces.
While he is excited about the opportunities presented by "Hot Ones," he wasn't necessarily thrilled with the response from the Henson.
“I felt kind of bad about it," he said. "I don’t want that kind of feedback about my product. It tastes great.”
He mentions that Extreme Karma isn't the hottest sauce he produces. A sauce called Ashes to Ashes is twice is hot.
"It will melt your face off," Olczak said.
TRACYS@Gannett.com