Milder Chicken Wing Sauces?

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Cooking4Fun

Senior Cook
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Traditionally Buffalo wing sauce is like a Cayenne pepper sauce mixed with butter (or margarine if a restaurant wants to save money). Are there other more healthy ideas for making wing sauce more mild? What else can be used?
 
You can use any sauce you want; taco, barbecue, Korean barbecue, Makoto Yum Yum, sweet chili, even spaghetti. But if you don't use Terresa Bellissimo's original hot sauce recipe, you can't call them Buffalo Wings. Well, you can, but you would be wrong!
 
Since cayenne has little flavor, and is used mainly for heat, you can omit the cayenne - maybe use some mild paprika as a replacement, to give some flavor and color.
 
Okay, here are Terresa Bellissimo's original recipes for both the Buffalo Wing sauce and the Blue cheese CELERY dip. Be sure to use Frank's original Red Hot Sauce and Treasure Cave bleu cheese crumbles. Accept no substitutes!

Original Anchor Bar Buffalo Wings
Ingredients:

2 dozen chicken wings, separated at the joints, tips reserved
¼ lb butter
1 cup Frank's Original Red Hot Sauce (I put that **** on everything!)
2 Tbs white vinegar
2 Tbs granulated sugar
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 250F.

Bake the wings in a 250F oven for 15 minutes, then deep fry in vegetable oil to the desired texture (soft or crispy).

Melt the butter in a medium sauce pan over low heat and add the hot sauce and vinegar. Stir in the sugar until it dissolves. Whisk the cayenne pepper, chili powder, garlic powder and onion salt into the sauce until incorporated.

Simmer the sauce, covered, over low heat for 20 minutes (it is wise to NOT inhale the fumes!). Pour the sauce into large sealable storage bowl, add the chicken wings, seal the bowl, and shake it until the wings are completely coated. Be sure to wash the bowl thoroughly immediately after removing the wings or it will forever have an orange tint to it.

Original Anchor Bar Bleu Cheese Dip​
Ingredients:

1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup sour cream
juice of one lemon
2 cloves of garlic, pressed
5oz cup Treasure Cave all natural bleu cheese crumbles

Instructions:

Combine the mayonnaise and sour cream, add the lemon juice and garlic and mix well. Add the bleu cheese crumbles and stir until combined.

Serve chilled, with celery sticks.
 
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Which is more important to a person. "Authentic"? Or something they enjoy to eat. Just sayin'...


runs and hides...
The recipe is titled "Authentic Buffalo Wings" and the picture shows someone dipping their wing into ranch dressing. Although you are not supposed to dip the wings into the dip, the dip MUST be bleu cheese, not ranch or it is NOT AUTHENTIC!
 
Which is more important to a person. "Authentic"? Or something they enjoy to eat. Just sayin'...


runs and hides...
The recipe is titled "Classic Wing Sauce" If you want the classic, this is your guy, and the picture shows someone dipping their wing into ranch dressing. Although you are not supposed to dip the wings into anything (the dip is for the celery), the dip MUST be bleu cheese, not ranch or it is NOT CLASSIC! If someone slaps a Bibigo BBQ Sauce label on a bottle of Heinz ketchup, does that make it classic Korean barbecue sauce?
 
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Blech Cheese never darkens my pallet, SLoB. To me, it tastes like my memory of our son's sports bag after football or wrestling or track. [emoji1785] If I ever make wings, I'll be sure to call them Oven Baked Wings with Tasty Sauce.
Just looking for butter/margerine alternative that is healthier. I can add flavor depth later.
It's probably butter or nothing if you want something like the Frank's sauce recipe. Oils would probably be too thin, and a thicker substitute like cocoa butter might overpower the sauce. We rarely have wings. When we do I pick up either bbq style or teriyaki style from the butcher anyway.
 
First, its a great question because the number of “heat” sensitive nerves in the tongue varies by a factor of 1,000 across individuals. Consequently, the “heat” experienced by any two people will be remarkably different. The most important consequence of this is that any recipe or restaurant that automatically adds “heat” to their fodd is a culinary incompetent. The only proper way to add heat is with some kind of hot sauce on the table and none from the kitchen.


We prefer the way authentic Chinese restaurants do it. Kung Pau chicken comes out of the kitchen with no heat. Instead, there is a little jar on the table full of flakes of the hot peppers the Chinese use covered with oil. The diner then adds his preferred level of heat from the jar to the dish, stirs it in and eats. We are very heat sensitive. For Kung Pau, we add 1/8 teaspoon of the oil-- no pepper flakes allowed-- and that is, for us, neutron bomb heat. We NEVER order Kung Pau in a restaurant because the idiots don’t know how to cook Chinese food. The incompetent chef adds peppers in the kitchen.


The advantage of using Chinese hot pepper oil as desired is that it dilutes easier than does stuff like Tabasco Sauce. By adding oil with heat to the dish, the hot oil quickly diffuses the heat through the oil used to cook the dish.


However you choose to do it. The basic principle is dilute the heat source. You may have to mix Tabasco etc with water, but dilute and dilute until you get to where you like it.


Having sampled restaurant disaster Kung Pau on both coasts and in the Southwest, SW heat is dialed up from what is done on the coast. This is probably the result of the pernicious influence of Tex-Mex cooking.
 
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You might start by asking yourself why you want to ruin a perfectly good piece of meat by adding “heat” in the first place. Apparently, the tongue has taste buds, nerves which, along with the nose, determine the flavor of what we eat. The “heat” sensitive nerves in the tongue are not involved in tasting, they only do “heat”. Why, then did evolution equip the tongue with two sets of nerves that react to food, taste & heat? There is a chemcal that causes the “heat” experience. I think it called curcumin, and cayenne pepper is an almost pure example of it. This chemical does two things-- in moderation, it kills bacteria. Bacteria cause food poisoning. Bacteria cause meat to go rancid-- our nose is very sensitive to the stink of rancid meat because that smell means it is loaded with food poison bacteria. Up to a point, the “heat” in peppers kills bacteria, so before refrigeration, adding pepper to meat kept it from spoiling for a few more days. When meat was expensive or hard to get, peppers had a real economic, health, and evolutionary value, but only up to point. Putting it another way, “heat” kills living things. A little added heat is good because it kills bacteria but too much heat is bad because it will kill the lining of your mouth and throat. Don’t want that, so evolution gave us a good-bad physiological response to heat-- its good up to a point, then its bad. Unfortunately evolution never found the proper balance-- refrigeration made the evolution of heat irrelevant, leaving us in the pickle I described in an earlier post how much “heat” is enough? With refrigeration, the answer is none at all.
 
kb0000, I think you will find that a lot of us disagree with a great deal of what you wrote about hot food.

The chemical responsible for heat in chili peppers is capsaicin. Curcumin is a component of turmeric.
 
kb0000, I think you will find that a lot of us disagree with a great deal of what you wrote about hot food.

The chemical responsible for heat in chili peppers is capsaicin. Curcumin is a component of turmeric.

100 percent.

Another, imo more important, reason for adding heat to food is because people like the sensation. So much so that eating it triggers a release of serotonin in the brain - the pleasure chemical. And peppers offer more than just heat - they add sweet, grassy, nutty, etc., flavors depending on the variety and state (fresh, roasted, dried, etc.). They're quite versatile.

I just started reading a book called "Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells," by Harold McGee, author of "On Food and Cooking." Aromas are a very large part of our perception of taste - the brain combines sensations from the tongue and the nose to create flavor. So there are several reasons to include chiles and other peppers in our cuisines.
 
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