What Is Buffalo Sauce?
A classic buffalo sauce is sharp, rich and hot. It should be tangy, salty and almost have a creamy texture. This type of sauce makes the perfect partner for chicken wings, but also works on a grilled cheese sandwich or as a dipping sauce.
Our Buffalo Hot Sauce is one of the classic Sauce Shop recipes. It’s been around since we started in 2014 and is now available on our website, in Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose.
What does buffalo sauce taste like?
As a starting point, it should always be pretty hot. A dominant feature of this sauce is the tanginess that often comes from vinegar. Our recipe is made using lots of vinegar and aged Jalapeno peppers, which means it will linger on the tongue and lips. Check this article out to see how we make our Buffalo Hot Sauce.
As buffalo sauce is often used to coat chicken wings, the consistency will likely be thicker than a traditional everyday hot sauce. It should coat wings easily and have an almost creamy mouthfeel when being eaten. Some recipes feature butter, but our recipe is vegan friendly.
Are buffalo sauces spicy?
Yes! A buffalo sauce should be spicy. To taste great and do food justice, it has to offer a spice hit. It can’t all be about being tangy and rich. If you need to cool things down, serve it with a cooling ranch sauce or blue cheese dip.
In our Buffalo Hot Sauce recipe, we use our Signature Chilli Mash (more about that here), which basically means we make it using aged Jalapeno peppers. This is what delivers the heat but also a lot of the flavour. What that means is, we blend chillies with salt, sealing them in barrels. This is where the fermentation happens. After 2-3 weeks, our chillies have taken on a wealth of complex new flavours and are ready to be used in making our hot sauces.
What's the difference between sriracha and a buffalo sauce?
Despite both being chilli sauces, they are actually pretty different in style and would generally have quite different uses. They're both generally thicker than an everyday hot sauce (more along the lines of a ketchup consistency) and are a little bit tangy. Sriracha though will have a fruitier profile than a buffalo sauce and will often have a heavy garlic presence. In terms of uses, a sriracha style hot sauce is suited well to seafood, noodle dishes or kebabs.
Have you tried our Sriracha Chilli Sauce? Take a look here.
What sauces go well with buffalo sauce?
As we’ve covered, a solid buffalo sauce is spicy, tangy, creamy and rich, so when thinking about a sauce to complement that, you want something that has a different profile.
You can’t go wrong with a creamy, mild mayo or aioli for this. We’d recommend our Ranch Mayo, which is the ultimate dipping sauce for hot wings. Featuring buttermilk, sour cream, garlic and all of your favourite herbs, you don’t need to go further than this. It’s available in Waitrose stores and on our website.
How to make buffalo chicken wings
Great buffalo wings need a great sauce – we recommend using ours! There are so many ways to cook chicken wings, whether you’re frying in oil, baking in the oven or grilling on the BBQ. The easiest way at home is to oven bake or air fry, check out our Ultimate Easy Baked Buffalo Chicken Hot Wings Recipe here.
What food does buffalo sauce go with?
For the full list, check out our list of the top ways to use Buffalo Hot Sauce. The obvious answer here is chicken wings. The tangy sharpness of this type of sauce is perfect to cut through the fat of a wing and the texture is ideal for coating. Besides wings, you could use it to spice up a mac & cheese, coat corn ribs in it, add to a grilled cheese sandwich or as the sauce for buffalo cauliflower wings.
