Super Bowl Wings: Homemade Hot Sauce, Batch #00 Makes its Debut

I was looking forward to Super Bowl Sunday not only because it promised to be a great match-up, but also because I had been itching to use my homemade hot sauce on a batch of Super Bowl wings.

I did not know this before I started making wings this past NFL season, but the “original” Buffalo Wing Sauce recipe is simply a 50-50 mixture of melted butter and Frank’s Red Hot Sauce. Since I am not a very big fan of butter, I decided to try a 67-33 mixture of my homemade hot sauce and butter.

However, I was watching this Super Bowl in the Napa Valley and simply adding melted butter to hot sauce didn’t seem like much of a culinary challenge. Instead, I decided to make a slightly different version of the beurre blanc sauce from my earlier salmon and leek recipe.

I followed the same basic instructions from the Bouchon Cookbook, but with two alterations. First, I added some finely chopped garlic to the shallot-wine-vinegar base, because my favorite wing sauces typically have a nice garlicky flavor. Second, I did not add cream to the reduction before melting butter into the sauce. I wanted to stay as “traditional” as possible and retain the original hot sauce-butter recipe.

(Beurre blanc base with lots of chopped garlic)

("Butter, butter! Give me butter! Always butter!" - F. Point)

(Fresh beurre blanc!)

With the two key elements of the sauce completed, I turned my attention to the chicken. Since I had good luck with Petaluma Poultry’s roasting chicken back in my very first recipe, I bought two packs of “Rocky Jr.” wings at Whole Foods.

In order to add just a little bit more flavor to the wings, I quickly brined the wings in a very basic salt, honey, and thyme brine. They only sat in the brine for about an hour, because wings, obviously, are much smaller than an entire chicken (about 6 hours of brining). I dried the wings before setting them out to be cooked.

Although most wings are fried, I prefer to bake my wings. Considering I’m bathing them in butter, I figure that I don’t need to add any more plaque to my arteries. Before putting them in a 375-degree oven I put a little salt and pepper on the wings for a final dose of flavor. I took them out after about 45 minutes.

Now, it was time to put all the elements together. I had taken the hot sauce out to come to room temperature and measured out 2/3 of a cup of sauce and 1/3 of a cup of beurre blanc. I combined them in a measuring cup, stirred, and poured them over the wings, which were resting in a mixing bowl.

(1/3 of a cup beurre blanc; 2/3 of a cup hot sauce)

Sitting back with a plate full of wings and a Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA in the first quarter as the Colts looked ready to roll over the Saints, I was very content. The spice from the hot sauce and the tangy richness of the beurre blanc worked well together to create a distinctive sauce. The hot sauce, however, was a bit of a one-note sauce. It satisfied its requirement of being hot, but didn’t have much depth to it. This might have been due to the short aging period or the types of chiles I used. Needless to say, it will be a fun challenge to find new ways to improve on Batch #00 of my homemade hot sauce.