Hot Wings?

We offer Wing Zings as our hot wings. Have had them over 6 years. Deep fry, add cup of bleu cheese out the door. Had a customer call last week demanding to know where the "sauce " was. She said hot wings always have sauce?
Anyway, just wondering if it would be worth it to expand our “hot wings” and offer a few different kinds?
What do you offer? How are your sales? Ideas? I don’t eat them myself so I am clueless.
Thanks!

Buffalo style hot wings are deep fried plain, and then tossed with sauce after they come out of the fryer, that’s probably what your customer was expecting. The sauce is usually a 50/50 mix of Frank’s Red Hot and melted butter or equivalent, with the heat level adjusted with pepper puree or cayenne powder. Hot wings are generally a pretty popular item, I worked at several Wing Zone shops that had them as their primary item, and we delivered plenty of wings. Adding extra sauces is fairly easy, a good selection might be the classic hot, a honey BBQ, a honey mustard, and maybe a garlic Parmesan. You make the garlic Parmesan by mixing medium buffalo sauce with powdered Parmesan cheese, dehydrated garlic, and a pinch of cajun seasoning, it was always one of our most popular sauces at WZ (honey BBQ was usually #1). Hope this helps!

I sell a Hot & Spicy wing and and was having the same thing happen. When a new customer orders I make sure they are aware they are not Buffalo wings. Since I have started this disclosure up front I have not had any complaints.

Sounds good! Thanks for sharing. Going to try making the sauce.

It’s true most hot wings come with sauce, but sauce adds a lot of extra calories and is messier. I prefer dry hot wings, although I think the traditional wings have sauce.

We have up to now offered 7 diff flavors of wings
mild,hot,xxxhot,bbq,buffalo,honey bbq and seet & tangy
we usually deep fry when done then toss with sauce.It is def a great menu item that always moves thinking of adding a few more flavors, in our neck of the woods an order of wings is usually 8 pc. goes for $6.95

Here’s the list of sauces from one of my previous employers:

http://www.wingzone.com/images/flavorzone-v4.gif

Feel free to ask me about any of the sauces, some of them are great and some of them really are quite nasty, but I know how to make most of them.

when I think wings I think buffalo wings, tossed in franks n butter. although it seems to be harder to find unseasoned wings lately all my vendors look at me funny, and keep trying to sell me already seasoned ones. I prefer unseasoned as its less stuff to gunk up your fryer, and i get to play with different sauces, at the moment ive got a smokey (smoky cattlemans and a bit of honey to help it stick to wings as they come out of fryer), buffalo (2 parts clarified butter, 3 parts franks red hot), nuclear(same as above but adding daves insanity sauce).

sheb

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Do you fry them unbreaded? Just toss in the plain wings and then drop them in the sauce after frying?
Thawed or frozen? Thanks!

its a preference thing…traditional buffalo wings are never breaded always deep fried (about 12 min) and then sauced with a combination of hot sauce and butter and served with bleu cheese and celery sticks

Hopefully this isn’t a hijacking but more of a side track? What about the shops that don’t have, or can’t place a deep fat fryer? Is anyone having success with just a baked off wing?? Is the texture similiar and do customers seem to know the difference?

Please explain the celery sticks. Does it take away some of the heat?

We don’t have a fryer (didn’t want to mess with all the additional hood requirements) and have offered a variety of wings over the years. Started out with bakeable LaNova wings in three varieties, which were good but they take up lots of room in the little freezer and you can only just serve them as wings. Then we discovered boneless variations, of which we’ve gone through numerous companies and flavors. (We like adding them to salads, etc.) Our biggest success has been fully cooked Wing Zings and Wing Dings. People get a choice of spicy or plain (great for kids). We did get someone complain about the lack of shiny sauce but maybe we could just make up a batch of it for dipping. Does this work?

Thanks Marbles. That’s what I was looking for.

i think you are on the right track, thats a great product, but if you switch from the wing zings to the wing dings, It will give you so much versitilty. I love the nakd wings and you can do hot with franks sauce, add butter and you have buffalo, sweet baby rays and now you have great bbq wings too…fry the wings just like you do normally THEN sauce them when you bring them out.

Just traditional, the Anchor Bar that originated Buffalo wings served them with celery, so now everyone does. Some places serve celery and carrots, but I don’t consider them essential. At WZ we had celery as a side order, and I can’t say that I recommend that. Prepping it was labor intensive, there was a lot of waste, and people always thought that the celery was included for free. We did ocasionally have people with vegetarian or vegan friends order large amounts of celery, but that might be a Seattle niche market, and it was still a major hassle in general.

BTW, the bleu cheese or ranch served on the side will cool the heat, but vegetables by themselves do nothing to help the burn.

Think crudite . . . crisp vegetable pieces that offer textural variety, and can be dipped into the dressing thereby colling the heat without dipping the wing into the dressing.

:oops: Never thought of that. Great idea!

The most popular was the Rose Hill Buff Sauce. Saucy but served over a bed of crispy lettuce with 4oz of ranch/blue cheese each did well.

If you use this product or such, you need to heat the vinegar and butter first- then wisk in the buff base. Allow it to cool and then store.

PD