Intro
Buffalo Wild Wings is not the best place, nor is it worst place. Their wings are not the best wings, nor are they the worst wings. They are unremarkable and unimportant in many ways.
Buffalo Wild Wings is remarkable and important though, because it’s a common point of reference through which everyone can discuss buffalo wings. You can talk to anyone around the country about chicken wings and you can talk about your favorite BWW sauces, and use the wings as a point of reference for level of spice and flavor when discussing other wings.
And some of those sauces are pretty good, and even pretty unique. Some of them are worth discussing. Currently, there are 21 varieties of sauces and seasonings available on BWW’s regular menu. Of these, I’ve tried perhaps 10 at some point in my life.
I recently started a new job which happens to be located in the same shopping center as a Buffalo Wild Wings, and this got me to thinking: I should probably try to eat, review and rank all 21 flavors. So I put together a plan.
Methodology
In eating, reviewing and ranking all 21 wing flavors, I had a few goals in mind:
- I don’t want to be a pig and try every flavor in one sitting.
- I want to spend as little money as possible
- I want to be able to taste each wing (not too many spicy flavors in one sitting)
Here’s the plan I came up with to accomplish these goals:
On Tuesdays, Buffalo Wild Wings have special pricing on their wings. They also allow you to get your wings in a smaller quantity per sauce than they regularly do. So, I’m going to eat 12 wings (3 servings of 4 wings) each Tuesday.
But what order to try them in? If I worked from mildest to spiciest, my earliest weeks would be be lacking in heat and my later weeks would be unbearably hot. So I came up with this schedule (You can click on these to see reviews, if they’ve been written yet):
- Week 1: Salt & Vinegar Seasoning, Chipotle BBQ seasoning, Caribbean Jerk
- Week 2: Sweet BBQ, Honey BBQ, Thai Curry
- Week 3: Lemon Pepper Seasoning, Buffalo Seasoning, Hot BBQ
- Week 4: Teriyaki, Spicy Garlic, Hot
- Week 5: Mild, Jamin Jalapeno, Mango Habanero
- Week 6: Parmesan Garlic, Asian Zing, Wild
- Week 7: Medium, Desert Heat Seasoning, Blazin’
Each week features one of the 7 mildest flavors, one of the 7 medium-est flavors and one of the 7 hottest flavors. Each week is a little bit hotter than the last, but no week should be unbearably hot or unbearably boring.
All wings are traditional bone-in, and all sauced wings are ordered extra-wet, as sauce on a Tuesday can be rather skimpy otherwise. I’ll be getting my wings to go and walking them back to my office, which is about a 3 minute walk.
I’ll be publishing brief reviews (1-2 paragraphs, probably) of each sauce every week as I try them, as well as updating a “power ranking” post which ranks all of the wings I’ve tried thus far. These posts will not be about the quality of the wing, but will focus on the merits of the sauce/seasoning.
I acknowledge that this is going to be a difficult project to keep accurate in my mind and it may be hard to remember flavors I ate 7 weeks ago. But I’m going to do my best, and I hope you’ll have some fun going along on this journey with me.