Buffalo Wings

What to expect

Taste

Sour before hot, which surprises people who have only had the sweet supermarket version. Cayenne sauce is mostly vinegar and the acidity arrives first and sharply, followed by a broad even chilli heat that sits on the middle of the tongue rather than spiking. Butter rounds it and makes it salty and rich, and there is a faint savoury depth from the Worcestershire underneath. The blue cheese is the counterweight: cold, fatty, funny-smelling and salty, and eating the two together is most of the point.

Aroma

Hot vinegar and butter, which is unmistakable and carries across a room. Under it, roast chicken skin and a little garlic. The vinegar smell is sharp enough at the pan to catch in the back of the throat.

Texture

The reason to bother. The skin should shatter and then give way to meat that pulls off the bone in one piece, and there should be no soft rubbery layer of unrendered fat between the two. The sauce is slippery rather than thick. Celery is cold and snapping against all of it, and the dip is thick and lumpy.

Sound

Wings should be audible. A properly crisp one makes a distinct crack at the first bite, and a tray of them tipped into a bowl rattles rather than slumps.

How the flavour moves

Vinegar, then heat, then butter, then a long slow burn that builds across the plate rather than within one wing. The first is bright and almost thin; by the sixth the heat has accumulated and the cold dip has stopped being optional. That build is why beer and blue cheese are both part of the format.

Serve it

Hot enough to be slightly awkward to pick up, which is correct, against a fridge-cold dip and cold celery. That contrast is engineered and it stops the richness becoming heavy.

Goes with

Cold lager, blue cheese, celery, and nothing that competes. Anything sweet on the same plate makes the vinegar taste harsh.

Cook's notes

Difficulty

Easy, with one moment of care at the sauce.

Cost

Cheap. Wings are among the least expensive parts of the bird and the sauce is butter and vinegar.

Equipment

A wire rack that fits inside a roasting tray, and a probe thermometer.

When to make it

Anything watched on television with other people.

Best season

None.

You know it is done when

Deep gold to mahogany, with the skin visibly blistered and drawn tight over the bone, and the wing tips of the drumettes pulling back from the joint.

And it feels like

The skin should crack rather than tear. If a wing bends without the skin fracturing it needs longer.

Food safety

74C/165F is the safety figure, measured in the thick end of a drumette away from the bone. Cooking past it to about 85C/185F is a quality decision rather than a safety one: at that point the collagen in the skin and joints has melted and the meat comes away cleanly.

Where it goes wrong

• Using bicarbonate of soda instead of baking powder, which tastes soapy.
• Skipping the uncovered chill, which is where the skin dries.
• Going straight to a hot oven, which leaves the fat under the skin unrendered.
• Boiling the sauce or dumping all the butter in at once, which splits it into oil and vinegar.
• Saucing the wings early and letting them stand, which undoes the whole method in about three minutes.
• Crowding the rack so the wings touch, which steams the sides that are in contact.

If it does go wrong

Sauce split into orange oil: it was too hot. Let it cool, then whisk it into a fresh tablespoon of melted butter a little at a time. Skin still soft: it did not dry long enough in the fridge, or the tray was crowded. Soapy taste: bicarbonate of soda was used. Wings tough at the joint: they were pulled at 74C/165F and would have been better at 85C/185F.

Making it ahead

The wings can be dried and dusted a day ahead, which is the better way round to do it anyway. The sauce has to be made at the last moment.

Keeping it

Two days in the fridge, but sauced wings do not keep well and the skin is gone within an hour.

Reheating

Only unsauced wings are worth reheating, on a rack at 200C/400F for 8 minutes, then sauce them fresh.

Freezing

Freeze the wings unsauced after the low bake if you want to get ahead. Do not freeze them sauced.

Leftovers

Pull the meat off cold wings for a sandwich with the blue cheese dip.

Scaling it

Scales as far as your oven has racks. Two trays need swapping halfway.

Substitutions

Any thin, vinegar-forward cayenne sauce works. A thick chipotle or sriracha-style sauce does not, because it will not emulsify with butter the same way and the result is a paste rather than a coating. Worcestershire sauce contains anchovy; if that matters, leave it out rather than substituting.

Dietary swaps

Contains milk, egg, fish and usually cereals containing gluten via the Worcestershire sauce. Not adaptable to dairy free in any honest way, since butter is the sauce.

Shopping for it

A thin cayenne-and-vinegar hot sauce is the one non-negotiable purchase. Blue cheese can be the cheapest in the shop, since it is being mashed into soured cream.

Keeping the cost down

Buy whole wings and joint them yourself; pre-jointed costs more per kilo and you lose the tips.

Nutrition

A hundred grams of butter in the sauce and rendered chicken fat in the pan. This is not a light dish and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

Worth it?

The overnight chill and the low first bake are what make oven wings work, and neither can be skipped for the other.

Where it comes from

Origin

Buffalo, New York.

Also called

Buffalo wings, or simply wings in Buffalo, where the city name is redundant.

What the name means

Named for the city, not for the animal and not for a sauce. Buffalo sauce is a back-formation from the dish.

History

The Anchor Bar in Buffalo is where the dish is generally said to have been created, in 1964, by Teressa Bellissimo, and the bar has traded on that ever since. The specifics have never been agreed. More than one version circulates within the family's own accounts: that her son Dominic asked for something to feed friends late on a Friday night, and that a delivery arrived containing whole wings rather than the backs and necks ordered for stock. A separate and serious claim belongs to John Young, a Black restaurateur in Buffalo who was serving whole breaded wings in what he called mambo sauce in the same city in the same era, and who is recognised in Buffalo alongside the Bellissimos. Calvin Trillin investigated all of this for the New Yorker in 1980 and set out the competing accounts rather than picking one. Buffalo's mayor proclaimed a Chicken Wing Day in the city in 1977.

Why it matters

The wing went from a cut used for stock to one of the more expensive parts of the bird within a generation, and it is now bound to American sports television to the point where wing prices are reported as a seasonal news story.

When it is eaten

Bars, sport, and anything eaten standing up.

The traditional way

Deep fried unbreaded, then tossed in sauce. Ours is baked, which is a real departure and is discussed below.

How it changed

The sauce has sweetened considerably outside Buffalo, and the range of flavours sold as wings now runs to barbecue, honey garlic and lemon pepper, none of which are Buffalo wings. Boneless wings, which are not wings, are a further step away.

Regional variations

Blue cheese in Buffalo, ranch almost everywhere else, and the argument between them is a real one locally. Lemon pepper wings are an Atlanta institution and a separate tradition rather than a variant of this one.

How this version differs

Baked rather than fried, using baking powder and an uncovered chill to get the skin to crisp. This is not the traditional method and does not produce an identical result: fried skin is thinner and more brittle, and baked skin is slightly thicker with more render behind it. It is, however, the version that gets made on a Tuesday, and a litre of frying oil is the reason most people never make the real thing at all.

Sources and credit

Contested. The Anchor Bar and Teressa Bellissimo hold the best-known claim; John Young's is a genuine rival; the details of the Anchor Bar account differ between tellings by the family itself.

Related recipes

Categories

Cuisines

American

Courses & dish types

Main courses

Main ingredients

Chicken