Here’s a complete surprise I stumbled upon during the last family outing at our Fenton, Missouri Buffalo Wild Wings location… spicy ice cream! With my youngest son, Kevin in tow, we knew this was just something we had to try as soon as I spotted it in a special menu insert.
If you can’t find this frozen wonderment at your local B-Dubs, it’s in all likelihood that this is a test program that’s only available in select geographic areas…
Simple, effective, and delicious. This buffalo wing sauce recipe is just what you’ve been looking for if you want a good, tangy and basic hot wing sauce for home use on chicken wings. It’s a bit more than just a “melted butter and hot sauce” combo, but the extra ingredients only compliment the base classic buffalo wing flavor. This hot wing recipe is intended for all audiences. For a hotter buffalo wing sauce, replace the hot sauce listed below with a habanero or ghost pepper sauce.
Original recipe makes 8 servings.
Ingredients
Left to right: Me trying to quickly chew wing meat; finishing the last wing; posing with the Buffalo Wild Wing’s bison mascot.
Okay. Admittedly a large number of hardcore chileheads and elite wing fanatics would not think that the Buffalo Wild Wings Blazin’ Challenge is much of a chore. It’s deemed more of an arduous task by the general populace who may look up to this as the pinnacle of a gutsy soul possessing true bravado, taste buds of steel and a Teflon stomach. Flame fans in the know certainly know of far more serious and hotter contests much as the infamous Defcon Deathmatches, which make the fiery Blazin’ Sauce used in BWW’s contest look like Tabasco in comparison.
But for me, this was more symbolic than anything. As a burgeoning chilehead in 2004 – 2005, I quickly got myself acclimated to Buffalo Wild Wings’ searing heat. At the time I thought the estimated 200,000 – 350,000 Scoville Heat Units was mind-blowing for a heavy wing sauce, and always prided myself in finishing a dozen traditional or boneless wings drenched in the stuff (in BWW’s restaurant lingo, they were ordered “extra wet”). Around the time I conquered this “milestone” I became interested in trying my hand the Blazin’ Challenge. Much to my dismay, the St. Louis metro-area BWW locations sharply discontinued the Challenge right around the same time frame, and victory over this vanished from my reach…
Februarys in Columbus, Ohio can count on getting warmed up by the annual North Market Fiery Foods Festival. If you live anywhere in the area, you’ll want to check out the event this coming weekend. As always, our friends over at The Hot Zone Online (being the Ohio natives that they are) will provide excellent coverage.
The Fiery Foods Festival (not to be confused with the national Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show in Albuquerque) also gets some local media coverage, such as this from the Columbus Dispatch:
“You don’t have to be a professional chef to compete in the Fiery Foods Festival
“The 7th annual event Saturday at the North Market includes contests for amateurs. They can compete against other homemade salsa makers or amatuer hot sauce creators.
“The truly adventurous can sign up the day of the event to compete in the Hot Pepper Eating or Wings of Fire contest. The person with the iron mouth can win prizes from Cajohns Fiery Foods.
“Local professional chefs will also compete in the Chef Chili Challenge. There will also be vendors, musical acts and other events.
“Not brave enough to compete? Visitors can still…
GamedayEats.com is website geared towards showcasing recipes of sports fan foods – you know the snacks, dips, wings and meats we all proudly love to stuff our happy little faces with whether watching the game at home or tailgating out in the parking lot by the stadium. Gameday Eats is now trying their hand at making wings sauces. Curt Johnson of the site was kind enough to ship me a jar of their brand new Hellfire Habanero sauce to put through its paces…
I know there are no Quaker Steak and Lube locations within a couple hundred miles of St. Louis, but there’s enough of you that live in close proximity to one to make this very noteworthy.
The famous sports bar/wing eatery chain is having a contest to promote their new Triple Atomic Sauce. In a nutshell, if you make a video showing why you’re tough enough for the new wings, and if your entry gets chosen you could win free wings for three years and a $500 gift card. Watch the video below for more details or go to http://www.tripleatomictough.com.
Purveyors of some of the mightiest wing sauces on the planet and mainstays at hot sauce trade shows, Defcon Sauces owners John “The Creator” Dilley and his wife Maggie “The Createss” have racked up an impressive array of awards for their fiery products and have become a cult chilehead favorite. Eat some wings with a generous coating of one of their unique Defense Condition sauces and it’s highly likely they’ll become one of your favorites, too.
I recently asked John some questions and he didn’t disappoint as he responded in his usual humorous and eloquent way about a variety of topics.
Scott: How did you get started making wing sauces?
John: It all started in the late 1980’s. I had wings for the first time at a restaurant. They were no where near as popular as they are now. I really liked them. I had grown up learning how to cook from my grandmother as well as my mother, and really enjoyed experimenting in the kitchen. Well, the wing things were tasty, and I figured I could make them myself…
It’s hard to believe another year is coming to a close. With that, it’s time for me to award what I considered to be the elite fiery food products of 2009. To qualify for the running I had to either formally review the product on my blog or try it out for the first time this past year.
Although most of the items listed below could be classified as “spicy”, overall flavor trumps fire any day. I judged the products based on several factors, including taste, aroma, texture, consistency, versatility, and balance of heat and flavor…
You can’t peel me away from a good chicken wing, and it’s darned near impossible for me not to be reeled in by one. But if you give me a lackluster wing, and you’ll see me get mean in a hurry. I don’t know what was going on in the minds of John and Dave of Suck Creek Wings when they created their first batch of Original Wing Sauce; but chances are with my attitude towards wings, I would probably get along famously with them. I say this because in a market filled with mass-produced mediocrity, the duo aimed to create some of the savoriest and most memorable wing sauces in America, and by George they’ve developed a couple of superb products.
I love the name “Suck Creek Wings”. Although the moniker does come from a real creek located near the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based sauce company, I think the words also perfectly capture a down home, chicken wing eating experience: “suck” as in you would suck the meat and sauce off the wing bones; “creek”, as in, well, a Southern creek and the way it fits in when one conjures up a beautiful backdrop for chowing on some wings outdoors.
Suck Creek Wings were generous enough to send me a 11.4 ounce bottle of their Original Wing Sauce and a 5 ounce bottle of their “mystery” WFR Hot Sauce to do some tasting and testing.
Chef John of the Food Wishes Blog has put together a video on his technique for consuming flat chicken wing parts. Pretty nifty. I have my own style: the push your fingers from the other side through the two bones and suck the meat out method. But I’ll have to give Chef John’s a shot next time I have a plate full of buffalo wings in front of me and sees if it improves wing eating.
Buffalo Wild Wings has recently introduced two new flavors to their signature wing line. In this recent case, it is one dry rub seasoning – Desert Heat, and one liquid sauce – Pepper Infusion. This past Thursday I ordered wings with both flavorings, and in the interest of minimizing the mess, I acquired the boneless “wings” which can be eaten with a fork. The following is my review…
At participating locations, Buffalo Wild Wings is debuting two new sauce flavors – Desert Heat™ and Pepper Infusion™. The first one, Desert Heat, is not technically a sauce but a dry seasoning that by it’s description sounds like an intriguing chipotle-based flavoring. The Pepper Infusion sauce’s depiction is a little more vague but is probably draws a lot of it’s taste from chiles, and might be quite a bit hotter than Desert Heat. I’ll let you guys know what I think of each when I try them later this week.
Both are available for a limited time. If you wish to sample them yourselves, you can find the location of your nearest Buffalo Wild Wings here.
The next stop (just one of among many other forthcoming destinations) for fantastic St. Louis hot wings is the highly lauded Syberg’s Restaurant. Unlike most wing joints, Syberg’s is noted for having a noteworthy mustard-based wing sauce. Of source to give it credit, Syberg’s, with it’s four locations (five if you include the Syberg’s-owned Helen Fitzgerald’s Grill and Pub) is not a basic, “hole-in-the-wall” wing shack; most are sizable restaurants with expansive rooms, perfect for get-togethers with large groups of friends or family members. From past experience I would recommend Syberg’s when you and your clan need a family-friendly sports bar to hang out, eat, and have a good time.
For years Culpeppers has garnered a rep as one of, if not THE best, wings joints in the St. Louis, MO metropolitan area. As most of you in the Gateway City know, you can grab the goods at, as of this writing, nine different locations in the Missouri side of the mighty Mississippi river.
For this review, I visited the Arnold location. The inside was brightly lit, relatively spacious, and felt visually comfortable. Although Culpeppers specializes in typical American/pub cuisine, you won’t find sports memorabilia adorning the walls, TV screens hanging everywhere, and female wait staff in skintight outfits. Its decor was unlike your corner “sports bar”: the walls were covered with hoidy toidy Italian and French liquor ads from the 1920s and 1930s. There was a fireplace. And everything was geared toward welcoming the entire family. All of which makes Culpeppers a unique entity to be renown for serving great chicken wings.
My family and I sat down at a table was immediately taken care of by our waitress (I should have written her name down so that I could have given her the credit she deserves) and was never for want at any point during our experience. We ordered up some potato skins for starters. When they arrived, I noticed they were the skinniest skins I had ever seen – they were the size of one individual section of an orange…
I came across this link and found it rather interesting. A Kansas writer grades spring football players on how “hot” or “mild” their playing is, all based on the current line of Buffalo Wild Wings sauces, with Blazin’ being the hottest, then Wild, Mango Habanero, and so on. While the article is ultimately about Kansas college football – something in which I have very little interest – the implementation of the sauce scale is novel and may goofily carry over to uses in other areas of life. If you’re a BWW fanatic like me, you’ll know exactly where each sauce would fit in just by the mention of its name.