"How did you find a wing that looks like my granddad's big toe?"

Chef Gordon Ramsay, the volatile chef known from shows such as Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, was his usual vitriolic self on Hot Ones, a YouTube talk show with "hot questions and even hotter wings."

In the show, host Sean Evans grills celebrities like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Kevin Hart and Natalie Portman as they suffer their way through a series of chicken wings coated with increasingly incendiary sauces. Ramsay's episode was exceptionally profane and grew frenetic as the chef tried various remedies to counteract the heat — from cutting pieces of doughnuts to chugging a full glass of pink antacid to squirting his mouth with lemon and lime juice.

But Ramsay paused the expletives long enough to put in some positive words for Hot Ones Los Calientes hot sauce, which is made by Karma Sauce in Rochester.

"That's quite nice. I like that," Ramsay said, 10 minutes into the interview. "It's quite zesty."

He noted that the sauce was fruity, but had a heat level with a noticeable effect. "It's starting to move to the armpits. I'm sweating," he observed.

Since the episode went online Jan. 24, it has had more than 20 million views.

For the Los Calientes sauce, Karma Sauce owner Gene Olczak worked with the owners of hot sauce retailer Heatonist, who help curate the sauces for the show. (The show's producers ultimately decide what is featured.)

Heatonist sent Olczak a brief for the sauce they wanted, and he prepared test batches and mailed samples to the shop's home base in Brooklyn until the desired flavor and texture was achieved. The sauce has an apricot base but "doesn’t blast at you with fruitiness," Olczak said. It gets a broad chili flavor and a light smoky flavor from fresh and smoked serranos. Other ingredients include lemon, cumin, culantro (a cousin of cilantro), celery seed, onion and garlic. It can be purchased online at Heatonist.com.

Olczak was proud of the response from Ramsay. "It was nice to have a compliment on our product, no doubt about it," he said. "It was great, really, from my point of view.”

This was the second appearance for Karma Sauce on Hot Ones. The company made its debut in January 2018, when its own Extreme Karma sauce was the fifth hottest of the 10 sauces featured in the show's fifth season. The company's sales exploded; that month's sales matched those of the entire year of 2017.

Olczak initially ran the business in his spare time while working full time as an engineer on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope at Harris Corp.; when his work on the space telescope wound down, he left Harris to focus on the sauce company.

Then, he produced the sauces in a licensed 325-foot facility, one car wide and 1½ cars deep, carved out of the garage of his Perinton home. After the Hot Ones debut, the company struggled to keep up with demand.

"We kept cranking all through the summer and got caught up," Olczak said. Tractor trailers made regular appearances on his residential street in Perinton.

In the past year, Karma Sauce produced more than 120,000 bottles of hot sauce last year, which represented a growth of 2,200 percent, Olczak said. The company has moved to a larger space at 90 Canal St. in the Susan B. Anthony neighborhood, in the former home to Small World Food. The company now employs four people in addition to Olczak.

One major point of difference for his sauces: he uses fresh peppers, and grows many of his ingredients at his farm in Bristol, Ontario County. The new facility has a large smoker for smoking peppers, as well as a mill that can grind 1,000 pounds of peppers in an afternoon.

"We’re going to continue to use that capability to the best of our ability," Olczak said.

Moving forward, he plans to focus on private label products, such as to make custom sauces for area restaurants and bars. "We’ve done a few without putting up a shingle about it," he said.

Olczak is grateful to Heatonist and Hot Ones for the role they have played in the growth of his company.

“They give folks opportunities that are pretty great,” he said, noting that the show focuses primarily on small producers. "They did a lot to help us build our capacity right away."

Open house

Karma Sauce will host an open house in its new production facility at 90 Canal St. from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 9. It will include a tour of the facility and product samples.

TRACYS@Gannett.com