The Great Buffalo Experiment

I have long been a believer that almost everything tastes better with buffalo sauce on it. It started simply with the wing – we all know what I’m talking about, I don’t need to explain it. It was probably the allure of the 10¢ wing in college that first drew me in. I might not have cared for the taste at first, but when it was all you could afford you quickly grew to love it.

I don’t think I considered that buffalo sauce had more applications beyond chicken until my friend Laurie uttered the now unforgettable words “let’s order the buffalo onion rings.” Yes, onion rings tossed in buffalo sauce and served with blue cheese dressing. Let your imagination go wild, they are as good as you will dream them to be. If the wing drew me in, the ring made me a believer.

EVERYTHING tastes better with buffalo sauce on it.

Legal Seafood once featured a special buffalo fried shrimp appetizer. Fantastic. The Popcorn Factory sells buffalo-ranch flavored popcorn. Addictive. You know that company that makes the honey-mustard-onion flavored pretzels? They also make a buffalo flavored pretzel. Unbelievable. I cannot even talk about the buffalo flavored fried buffalo mozzarella that Grill 23 offered on their short lived bar menu. (I can’t talk about it, because it hurts too much that they were eliminated with the bar menu. Phenomenal.)

Buffalo sauce is the new bacon.

Now that I’ve confirmed this theory, I decided to launch the Great Buffalo Experiment – re-creating two classic snacks with a buffalo twist.

The first is not original, but it had to be tried at home. Buffalo seasoned popcorn. As much as I love the one offered by The Popcorn Factory, I have better things to spend $10 on every week than a small tub of popcorn. The process was simple. I used my air popper to pop a bowl of popcorn. I then added one tablespoon of Frank’s Hot Sauce to one tablespoon of melted butter to make the buffalo sauce, and tossed it with the popcorn. The end result? Not bad. Some of the pieces of popcorn got a little too drenched with the sauce and sort of disintegrated. But most of the popcorn was pretty good. The downside was it was really messy – much more so than regular melted butter. I needed a lot of napkins, and my hands were pretty orange when I was done (nothing a little soap and water couldn’t handle, though).

The second part of the experiment was a little more creative (in my opinion), and a lot less messy. I’m a big fan of Chex Mix – not the kind you buy pre-made in the store for a few bucks, but the kind you spend $20 on ingredients to make yourself. It may cost ten times as much, but the homemade Chex Mix is waaaaay better than the packaged kind. If you don’t know this firsthand, please go out and try it. It’s worth it. But I digress…

Yes, I made buffalo Chex Mix. I basically took the standard recipe, but instead of Worcestershire sauce, I used eight tablespoons of Frank’s Hot Sauce. I basically added one tablespoon at a time until the sauce had more of a buffalo taste and less of a butter taste. This happened after eight tablespoons, which resulted in far more sauce than the standard recipe (it typically calls for two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce). So, I had to bake it for an extra 15 minutes to make sure it was crisp enough. At the end of the day, buffalo Chex Mix may be the exception to the “everything tastes better with buffalo sauce” rule. The snack mix was pretty good, don’t get me wrong, but it couldn’t stand up to the original. To be completely sure, I also made a batch of the original and conducted a comprehensive taste test. 100% of the tasters agreed that the original was better, but the buffalo version wasn’t bad. Okay, I was the only taster. Give me a break.

I am standing by my original statement with only a slight modification. Pretty much everything tastes better with buffalo sauce. After all, every rule needs its exception.