Cluck-u-Chicken wings sauce?

April 2, 2008 2:08 PM

My friends and I, all hot wings connoisseurs, would love to get our hands on the sauce that Cluck-u Chicken franchises use on their hot wings - specifically the nuclear, thermonuclear, and global sauces. Can anyone point us to a website that tells us what the magic ingredients are? Can any former employees tell us how the sauce is purchased? I'm guessing individual stores get it in powder form and then add water. Maybe someone would be nice enough to transcribe the list of ingredients? Also do Cluck-U locations add the sauce exclusively after making the wings?
posted by exhilaration to food & drink (6 comments total)

not much help, but i always thought wing sauce came in a bucket and they diluted it with butter or something to achieve different levels of heat.
posted by jessica at 3:10 PM on April 2, 2008

not exactly the answer to your question. but if the end game is that you would like to have the hot sauce on hand in your house cluck-u will sell you their hot sauce
posted by phil at 3:15 PM on April 2, 2008

I've worked at many a wing restaurant. I don't know these Cluck-u-Chicken guys, but I very much doubt that they fry their wings with sauce on them. Doing so would get all kinds of crap in the fryer oil, make it hard to fry the wings and require frequent changing of the oil. A few places sauce the wings and then briefly broil them, but this is labor intensive and not a lot of places do it.

The sauce is almost certainly delivered to individual stores in bottles - making something from a powder wouldn't be very good or very efficient. It could be diluted with butter or something at the restaurant, but it's much more likely that they do all that where the sauce is produced, because then it has a much better shelf life and doesn't require work at the store.

They probably fry the wings as normal (possible soaking them for a while first, but then you will have fryer oil issues), and then shake the wings in a bucket with the sauce.

The quality of wings makes a bigger difference than the sauces, in my opinion. A Hooters, BW3 or other place with big meaty wings (I think that these places have those kinds of wings, it's been a while) are using "50 count" or "60 count" wings. That's the number of wings to ten pounds of frozen wings, so each wing is like .15 - .2 lbs. That's much meatier and bigger than the crappy ones your local bar uses when they have ten cent wing night, those might be like 120 count wings. When you consider the weight of bone, gristle and in in frozen wings, that's not too much meat left over.

These are all just guesses, but all the wing places I've worked at have done it like this.
posted by iknowizbirfmark at 3:28 PM on April 2, 2008

P.S. Your best bet might be to get an employee to sell you a gallon jug of the wing sauce "out the back door" or something like that. A gallon of sauce probably costs the store $10, you can buy it for $20 and it will make you hundreds of wings.
posted by iknowizbirfmark at 3:29 PM on April 2, 2008

Seconding iknowizbirfmark about how the wings are cooked. Every place I've ever known deep fries them, then tosses them in a bowl/bucket/whatever with the sauce.

As for what might cause the hotness in the sauce... All I know is the place I worked (a local place, not Cluck-u) they added varying amounts of habanero to get the hot sauce hotter. Our hottest sauce was quite hot, and I have a good tolerance for that sort of thing. So habanero will get you very hot wings if that's all you're looking for, and you just add more until it's as hot as you want it.

One time a woman brought in her teenage son who was bragging to her that he could eat our hottest wings. So she took me aside and asked if we could make them even hotter than normal so he wouldn't be able to eat them. I told her we could. I went back and told the manager and he became very excited about the joke. All I can say is he added a LOT of habanero to the normal hottest sauce, and that kid could not eat the wings. The mother thought it was hilarious.
posted by Nattie at 4:54 AM on April 3, 2008

Thanks everyone. I'll be buying the sauce online.
posted by exhilaration at 11:09 AM on April 8, 2008