The main entree at our tailgate this week is going to be chicken wings, and as the girl with the Buffalo connection, I’m responsible for the sauce. The normal sauce is easy–Frank’s Red hot and butter. But all the guys are talking about how they want something really hot, and I feel like making some grown men cry. One of my co-workers donated five habaneros from his garden to the cause, and I have about ten fresh cayennes and numerous cans of chipotles in adobo sauce. I’m googling around trying to find something, but I’m having trouble. Help me design a sauce recipe! As a lawyer, I can draft an appropriate waiver for people to sign before eating them.
I’m going to be getting the rest of the ingredients (if necessary) this afternoon, so hopefully some hot sauce aficionados are reading now.
You can always just use the Franks-margarine/butter base and add finely chopped habaneros. That’s what I like to do. Or, if you want to keep the same flavor, you can add one of those “insanity” sauces to the sauce. (I’m not a fan of most of them, as they taste a bit chemically to me, but Dave’s Insanity actually has pretty good flavor.)
If you go the habanero route, I like to add a little garlic and something sweet (either honey or apricot preserves) to round out the sauce a little bit.
ETA: As for what you have on hand, chipotles are pretty tepid peppers, maybe a 4/10 on the heat scale. However, they do add a distinctive, smokey taste to anything you put them in. Cayennes are reasonably hot (6 or 7/10), although I personally would just use the habaneros in the recipe.
I would use both peppers, mash or blend them into a paste along with a little garlic and onion. Maybe try to get a few serranos or poblano peppers to throw in as well. Throw your weak Red Hot away and get something hotter. Most grocery stores carry at least a few things hotter than Red Hot/Tabasco, find one of those and use that for the base. I don’t know if I’d use Dave’s Insanity, those are pepper extract sauces (they extract most of the oil that makes the peppers hot, leaving some of the pepper “mash” in for flavor. That sounds pretty damn hot, and might be a bit too hot for most people. I love hot sauce, but refuse to eat pepper extract sauces. Habaneros and maybe a couple other types should kick things up pretty nicely, I’d make a “normal” batch for the wussies though.
It depends. If you want them to keep tasting like Buffalo-style wings, you need the Red Hot or a similar vinegar-based sauce. If you just want hot wings, the sky is the limit. I personally like the Red Hot, because when I want wings, I usually want Buffalo wings.
Yeah, I’ll be making the traditional sauce for the sane people, and probably a BBQ or teriyaki for the kids. This one’s just for the lunatics who say “Oh, there’s no such thing as too hot!” I want to make something for those guys, too.
There you go. I don’t have a cite, but adding anything sweet to your basic hot sauce will make it hotter because the sugar opens up your tastebuds to the hot. If you want to try a little experiment, put a little hot sauce on your tongue and then drink water. Now try a little hot sauce on your tongue and then drink a sugary soda.
This reminds me of some wings I got years ago when I first went to college in Houston. The place had five grades of heat, with the mildest being “Hot” and the hottest listed as “Suicidal.” We got the “Suicidal” wings, of course.
They were so hot that my whole mouth and chin went numb.
I have never heard that before. Interesting. I would do your experiment with water vs. sugar water, though. Soda has so much other stuff in it (citric acid, carbonation, etc.) that you would need to control for that.
My cousin and I did one of those stupid “World’s Hottest Wings” challenges at a local bar here in Chicago video here. They make you sign a waiver and all that shit. They were tasty wings, based on habanero (they were big on marketing that it was made with the Red Savina habenero, one of the, if not the hottest of the habanero varieties). The sauce was tasty and seemed to be balanced with orange juice and tomato sauce of some sort, on top of a vinegary base. If these are “world’s hottest” then my capacity to sense heat is completely shot. They were about on par with Buffalo Wild Wing’s hottest wings.
Okay, I made it. Used the peppers I had on hand, plus a can of chipotles for the flavor. Didn’t seed any of the peppers. It’s hot. I had a tiny dab of it about ten minutes ago and i can still feel the burn. I’m going to taste it Friday night, to see how the flavors melded, and maybe add a splash of Tupelo honey if it seems necessary.
Now it needs a name. As I’m going to be adding butter and using it as a wing sauce, I was considering OMGWTFBFLO. But I’ll take suggestions–an Ohio State theme may be nice.
If you want to kill them, use something like Da Bomb: Final Answer, Pure Cap, Habanero 750, or anything else that comes in a medicine bottle with an eye dropper. Really. We made people sign waivers before we would feed it to them.
Some of those are all hype, no heat (well, very little). Pure Cap, in particular, is not pure capsaicin, despite the name, and I think is only something like two or three times hotter than jalapenos.
Really? I remember seeing Pure Cap in hot sauce catalogs, and they claimed you could put 1-2 drops into a big pot of spaghetti or chili and the whole thing would be blistering hot. I never dared to try it, seemed too hot for me. What’s it made of then?
