Spice Up Your Life With a Hot Ones-Inspired Chicken Wings Party

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Who’d have guessed that one of the best ways to make blasé celebrities interesting is to have them consume incendiary hot sauces while they answer questions? On the YouTube web series Hot Ones, host Sean Evans sits down with the likes of Paul Rudd, Post Malone, and Scarlett Johansson while they devour chicken wings doused with increasingly fiery sauces.

The show, which has already led to a spinoff, Hot Ones: The Game Show, on TruTV, is now becoming a popular dinner-party theme. “The reactions, the competitiveness, the torture—it’s all part of enjoying the sauce and the show,” says Krysty Pringle, a partner at hot-sauce specialty store Heatonist in Brooklyn, N.Y. The shop has a section dedicated to Hot Ones sauces, including the show’s most famous bottle, the Last Dab XXX. Powered by three versions of the scorching Pepper X (said to be twice as spicy as the famous Carolina Reaper), it’s usually the final sauce sampled on each episode.

Superfan C.B. Cebulski, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, finds hot sauce to be the great uniter at a dinner party: Group tastings are a built-in conversation starter, an instant source of conviviality. It’s also the rare person who doesn’t like chicken wings. (For vegetarians, he provides rice balls.)

Cebulski offered a few ground rules for those who want to throw their own hot wings shindig:

1. Order in non-sauced chicken wings or make your own (recipe below). Serve about a dozen sauces. If you offer too many, their nuances get lost; too few, and you’re basically just eating hot wings.

2. Have everyone sample the sauces in the same order, from mild to hot; don’t skip around.

3. Guests should taste each sauce at approximately the same time; seeing who can handle the heat and how they react is a major part of the fun.

4. Sample hot sauces from around the world—you might have picked them up as a souvenir, received them as a gift, or bought them on a whim at a market. A wider range adds to the experience.

5. A mix of “flats” and drumettes is the classic way to taste, but boneless wings make for easier dipping.

6. Cool down properly. At an unofficial 3.18 million Scoville units (jalapeños top out at 10,000), Pepper X is no joke. Provide fatty, creamy products like ranch and blue cheese dressings and avocado slices. Honey also helps alleviate the burn—as do salty potato chips.

Funktown Chicken Wings

Recipe from Andrew Carmellini, chef-owner of the Dutch, New York

In a shallow bowl, combine ⅓ cup all-purpose flour, 1 tbsp salt, 2 tsp ground pepper, 1 tsp cayenne pepper, and 1 tsp smoked paprika. Working in batches, lightly coat 36 dry chicken wings and drumettes in the mixture.

Fill a medium-size enameled cast-iron casserole halfway with vegetable oil and heat to 360F. Add about one-quarter of the wings, being careful not to crowd the pot. Fry, turning once, until golden and cooked through, 5 minutes. Transfer to a paper-towel-lined plate and cook the remaining wings. Serve with hot sauces.