Wing Sauce, Fried Chicken, and More Potato Salad

Now that we've got barbecue sauce making down pat, it's just made sense to try making our own homemade versions of many other sauces, dressings, and condiments. One of my personal favorites is buffalo wing sauce, so when reaching the bottom of a bottle one day it was obvious we needed to try making our own.

We've now done homemade wing sauce twice so far, and he's the ingredients used the first time around: garlic powder, paprika, apple cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne, butter, garlic hot sauce, and a few dabs of buffalo flavored tabasco.

All the ingredients are whisked together thoroughly. If you've got too much heat from the hot sauce or it isn't the right color or consistency, you can also throw in some extras, like brown sugar, ketchup, or tomato sauce.

While the flavor will already be almost-there just by mixing together, I recommended heating on the stove along with some extra butter for at least a half an hour so the flavors mix together better.

For the second batch, I ditched the tabasco and brown sugar, threw in some chili powder, and switched out the garlic hot sauce with the "Bull Snort" brand Texas Tail Torcher sauce. The end result was spicier, but had a much more spot-on buffalo flavor and the proper bright red color. Most of the recipes I've read online (and even one of our Facebook fans!) recommend using Frank's Red Hot as the base sauce, but I wanted to use things I already had on hand to keep the cost down, as a bottle of Frank's Red Hot is already as much or more than a bottle of ready made buffalo sauce.

For the finishing (and punishing!) touch, I carefully put a few drops of Satan's Rage sauce into the final product.

Now that we have our sauce, what to do with it? We had some chicken thighs in the freezer and decided to try out a twist on fried chicken. For our version, we're injecting the chicken with buffalo sauce and using a spicy coating. In the picture below you can see me putting on the initial coat of seasoning consisting of flour, cayenne, chili powder, garlic powder, and pepper. There are a lot of variations you can use here as well. For extra crunch, smash up some plain corn flakes and throw it in as well.

After the first coating the chicken is dunked in a bowl of milk, and then returned to the flour mixture and thoroughly covered again. At this point I inject the buffalo sauce directly into the meat using the red injector needle you can see at the lower-right corner of the image.

Normally we bake or grill our chicken, but in this instance we decided to go the messier and less healthy route and fry in oil.

Our wing sauce injected chicken thighs took about 16 minutes to cook in the bubbling hot oil - your times may vary depending on size and what part of the chicken you are using, as this could easily work with drumsticks, breasts, or wings. Don't forget to save your oil when done, as it can be used to fry things again. Simply turn off the heat and wait a few hours for it to cool, and then pour back into its original container or any other plastic container you've got lying around. We re-use an old plastic potato salad bucket.

Here's the first beautifully golden brown fried masterpiece coated with slightly spicy seasoning on the outside and pleasantly hot wing sauce on the inside.

Injecting the meat worked better than I expected for a fried meal, and we'll be doing this from now on with a variety of different sauces. It takes the already-awesome crunch of fried chicken and adds in a completely different and totally unexpected dimension of flavor.

Fried chicken alone isn't a meal of course, and this particular day happened to be perfect picnic weather, so we put together a potato salad to go with it. For a step-by-step on how to make potato salads, you can see our previous blogs covering standard veggie or chicken bacon ranch varieties, as well as a look at southwest and Italian versions.

This particular kind we made to go with our fried chicken was dubbed "Potato Salad Supreme," because it takes the standard veggie version of potato salad and ups the ante with everything delicious. Here are the cubed and boiled potatoes with shredded cheese, diced hardboiled egg, anaheim pepper, and both red and green bell pepper.

To make the dish more exciting, we cooked and finely chopped a whole mess of crispy bacon.

All the ingredients are then blended together with a combination of mayo, dijon mustard, standard yellow mustard, and about half a ranch dressing seasoning packet.

At the end of all that hard work we finally had a picnic meal ready to take out to the beautiful Ryan Dam island for a fantastic lunch, complete with a side of seasonal melon.