<p>On Super Bowl Sunday, my wife and I made chicken wings with Kroger brand wing sauce (medium) and just loved them. The sauce clung to the wings without being sticky or starchy, and they were both flavorful and very hot. The heat mellowed once the wings were a day old, and the flavor got even better.</p>
<p>Yesterday we made wings again with two different sauces. One was Famous Dave’s Devil’s Spit barbecue sauce, which was excellent, a nice balance of sweet and hot.</p>
<p>The other was Frank’s Red Hot Buffalo wing sauce, and I was surprised that I didn’t really like it that much, certainly much less than the Kroger sauce. It was hardly thicker than standard Red Hot (which I will eat on just about anything) and therefore didn’t really stick to the wings, and the flavor wasn’t nuanced. It pretty much tasted like Cayenne pepper, which is a great flavor, but I think hot wings require something a bit more subtle and complex.</p>
<p>We bought the wings in a 10-pound bag from Sam’s Club. They were a good size and meaty, with a reasonable amount of skin and fat. (I’ve had wings that were huge but seemed to be all skin and fat. Yuck.)</p>
<p>Just sharing my thoughts, not really making a point. But I do recommend Kroger’s medium wing sauce.</p>
<p>Frank’s Original Red Hot Sauce is supposed to be mixed 50%/50% with melted butter for Buffalo wings. Like one stick butter to 8 to 12 ounces of sauce. More butter = milder. Less butter = hotter.</p>
<p>If you are opposed to the fat of the wings, you can use chicken breast…dredge in a little flower and cook in olive oil to brown and finish in the oven…and use straight Franks, not diluted with butter
But then there is the bleu cheese dressing…another story</p>
<p>It was just the basic Kroger wing sauce, “medium” variety (which was really quite hot).</p>
<p>We used to simmer the wings in the sauce, but we found that the meat would fall apart too easily, so this time we just tossed the wings in the sauce and let them sit for 10 minutes before eating them.</p>
<p>My wife made a blue cheese sauce herself with blue cheese, buttermilk, and a little garlic and salt. Nice!</p>
<p>Basic wing sauce was never anything but fat (butter or oil) and Tabasco-type hot sauce (cayenne peppers, salt, vinegar). I’ve never tried pre-mixed wing sauce. Why pay twice as much for that as I would for the Frank’s and the margarine? To avoid cleaning a little pan?</p>
<p>(It has been ages since we had anything like this in my house. Boo-hoo-hoo. We are allowed to have celery sticks, though.)</p>
<p>Before Super Bowl Sunday, we never used pre-made wing sauce, either. We mixed butter, Red Hot, and our own seasonings. My only complaint was that the sauce doesn’t stick very well to the wings. The Kroger sauce has something in it to make it stick, whatever it is (a gum of some kind, I think). I thought I would object to the flavor, but I didn’t find it gelatinous or starchy at all. Normally I would make my own wing sauce.</p>
<p>I’m no expert, but I make wings by tossing with a little oil, cooking in a 450 oven until brown (say 40 minutes), tossing them with a sauce ( a glaze, not an oil- or butter-based sauce) and cooking for another ten minutes or so. They turn out crispy and delicious, and they will have already rendered a good bit of the fat. It’s not a low fat recipe and I’m not looking for one. I make it because it’s yummy.</p>
