Domino’s Pizza recently sent out some information regarding changes to its chicken wing offerings. And while the document has predictable information like the fact the average wing size is “slightly reduced to industry standard,” we were more fascinated by this chart that breaks down some demographic information on Domino’s various dipping and wing sauces.

Apparently, only children enjoy blue cheese and ranch sauces, and adult males are the sole demo to prefer the buffalo “kicker” sauce. Domino’s says that Hispanics have the narrowest range of sauce preference, with only the Sweet Habanero Mango being listed.

What do you think? Do Domino’s findings match your own preferences?

Domino’s: Our Hot Wings Are Too Hot For Women, Hispanics

Can Chicken Wings Be Racist?

Food prices in the state dropped almost 5 percent over the past three months as grocers, battling for dollars and a larger share of the market, worked to lure shoppers with coupons, cash rebates and lower base prices.”

Arizona shoppers see the cost of food drop as grocers compete

Some might look at the KFC Double Down — aka the bacon and cheese sandwich with fried chicken “buns” — and say “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” But the fried chicken chain is hoping you’ll associate the sandwich with the rear ends of young college women.

KFC Pays College Girls To Advertise Double Down On Their Butts

$7 for Two Dozen Wings at Long Wong’s ($13 Value)

Visitors from Ithaca enjoy the wings at last year's Buffalo Wing Festival at Coca Cola Field.

Updated: September 02, 2010, 3:19 PM 

// Christian Scaffo sells paintball guns for a living, but his passion is a hot sauce featuring the bhut jolokia, a pepper so fiendishly hot it would hurt less to have a paintball fired at your tongue.

For more than 15 years, the New Jersey man has been tinkering with his recipe, which includes other unusual ingredients, like bananas, maple syrup and homemade candied figs. But the fiercest is the bhut jolokia pepper, with spiciness of about 1 million Scoville units — about 20,000 times the heat of a jalapeno. 

“I almost kill myself when I make it, because I have to taste it as I go,” said the former chef. “I don’t really look forward to that part. I’m a big fan of the sweet and spicy. It adds more character to the sauce. It adds more depth.” 

On Saturday, Scaffo and four other homemade sauce crafters will see how their tasty visions measure up in the Amateur Creative Sauce-Off competition at the Buffalo Wing Festival, the ninth annual two-day event celebrating chicken wings with music, live entertainment and, of course, tons of wings. After making their way to Coca-Cola Field at their own expense, from as far away as Kansas City, the competitors will have 15 minutes to whip up their sauce and see if their creation reigns supreme in the stadium kitchen. 

They’re competing in the creative sauce competition for amateurs. Unlike the traditional sauce contest, the creative “sauce-off” encourages the use of unexpected ingredients as competitors try to persuade judges to rethink the chicken wing. The array of new ideas for the old chicken wing speaks to the way love for the once-spurned chicken digit has permeated every corner of America. 

Kelly Mockler of Madison, Wis., decided fresh cranberries — a Wisconsin crop — could offer a fresh take on wings. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a wing sauce that used cranberries, and I wanted to use a local ingredient, so why not cranberries?” she said. 

Then she went through her kitchen cabinets and rounded out the sauce with garam masala, an Indian spice mixture, pomegranate molasses, cinnamon and a hint of the flavorful — but not particularly spicy — guajillo pepper. 

The pomegranate molasses was inspired by muhammara, a pomegranate-walnut-red pepper spread. It turns out Middle Eastern spices “work well with cranberries,” she said. On Saturday, the judges will see if they agree. 

Thailand’s red curry sauce inspired Lisa Gentile, a lawyer from Alburtis, Pa., to get involved. She’s bringing lemongrass, garlic, ginger and cumin to the mix, along with an assortment of peppers. 

One of Jamie Payne’s favorite drinks is the mojito, where mint leaves are crushed with simple syrup and flavored with lime. Payne, of Port Allegany Pa., will stir fresh mint and lime zest into her sauce, with a touch of rum and a dose of honey for sweetness. 

Todd Zimmer, of Kansas City, Kan., decided to doctor up his sauce by splitting the difference, in a flavorful way, between his native Western New York and current Kansas City home. His “Bufsas” features some of the familiar cayenne pepper sauce but adds molasses from the Kansas City barbecue sauce roster, plus fresh cilantro to echo its thriving Mexican community. 

The resulting flavors, Zimmer wrote, will “kick your butt while they kiss your face.” 

Zimmer, a member of the Clarence High School Class of 1986 who moved to Kansas City in 1997, has been cooking his wings since a short stint at Sorrentino’s. Now he’s perfecting his unique sauce and contemplating selling it. 

In Kansas, as the only Buffalo guy at many gatherings, he started bringing chicken wings slathered with his evolving sauce. That’s how wings appeared at his office’s monthly birthday celebration. 

“I started that right when I moved here,” said Zimmer, a graphic artist for Huhtamaki, a packaging company. “Then when I was making them, I was asked for more. That’s a lot of the inspiration to start a sauce business, from friends, and friends of friends, and people I didn’t even know.” 

In New Jersey, Scaffo, who sells Venomous Designs paintball guns, has been wowing crowds too, but the homegrown bhut jolokia peppers he uses in his sauce deliver more pain than pleasure. The time he actually ate one, “I thought I was going to die,” he said. 

For Scaffo, the question will be how to scale down the heat to a pleasing tickle that ecites, not incinerates, the judges’ palates. So he starts with a batch of his mother’s candied figs, expands the base with maple syrup, bananas and more. “That has very little heat,” Scaffo said of his sauce base. “From there I can escalate it to any point you want.” 

Here come the peppers, a blend of cayenne, chipotle, ancho, habanero and bhut jolokia. 

In the kitchen stadium, Scaffo will find out if he found the sweet spot or went too far. “Anybody can make something hot,” Scaffo said. “You got to make it taste good, too.” 

Zimmer, the former Western New Yorker, understands that some people recoil at the idea of messing with the classic wing sauce. Recently, he sat next to a Buffalo guy on an airplane, and the conversation turned to wing sauce. 

Zimmer told him about his concoction, and when he got to the fresh basil, “he just cringed,” Zimmer said. 

“Nope,” the man told him. “There is no wing sauce except Frank’s Hot and butter.” 

Zimmer kept the man’s business card. 

“When I get some together I’ll send him some,” he said. “We’ll see if his opinion stays the same.” 

WING FESTIVAL SCHEDULE 

Hours at Coca-Cola Field, Washington and Swan streets, are noon to 9 p.m. Saturday and noon to 7 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 per day, 8 and under are free. Wings are three for $2 at vendors, using a ticket system. For information: www.buffalowing.com 

Saturday highlights 

1 p.m.: .5K Running of the Chickens 

1:30 p.m.: Amateur Creative Sauce-Off 

2 p.m.: Amateur Traditional Sauce-Off 

3 p.m.: Buffalo Wing Eating with Joey Chestnut 

4 p.m.: Yancey’s Fancy Cheesiest Couple, semifinals 

5 p.m.: Amateur Wing Eating Championship 

6 p.m.: Buffalo Buffet Competitive Eating Contest 

7 p.m.: Buffalo Blue Cheese Bowl 

8 p.m.: Concert by Eric “Badlands” Booker 

Sunday highlights 

12:30 p.m. Miss Buffalo Wing Pageant 

2 p.m.: Baby Wing Competition 

2:30 p.m.: Discover Photo Contest 

3 p.m.: Dennis George, Quiz Master 

3:30 p.m.: U.S. Chicken Wing Eating Championship 

4:30 p.m.: Yancey’s Fancy Cheesiest Couple, finals 

5 p.m.: Ridiculously Hot Buffalo Wing Eating Contest 

5:30 p.m.: Dennis George, Quiz Master 

Get sauced — at Buffalo Wing Fest

In the early 1990s the Bills weren’t the only Buffalo institution to gain national notoriety. Until then, Buffalo wing existed only as a regional delicacy.

Then McDonald’s added Mighty Wings, to the menu in 1990, and KFC experimented with wings of their own in 1991, but with only mixed results. It wasn’t until 1994 that chicken wings found a home: Domino’s began a national advertising campaign featuring a flying buffalo to promote adding wings to pizza orders.

“When Domino’s featured the ad with the flying buffalo, it put the chicken wing in a new stratosphere, and it has never looked back,” says Richard Lobb, spokesperson for the National Chicken Council in Washington.

Today, many pizzeria owners find that wings are a natural fit on their menus. 

“Wings, pizza and beer are the perfect combination, really,” said Corey Balzer owner of American Pie Pizza Company (americanpiepizzaco.com), with 12 locations in the Central Florida. “It’s easy food to eat at events like a Super Bowl party because it can be picked up and enjoyed by the masses.”

Indeed the National Chicken Council estimated that more than 1.25 billion wings were consumed during Super Bowl weekend in 2010–but that weekend accounts for less than 10% of the 13 billion chicken wings sold annually.

However, there is a downside to this popularity: the overwhelming demand for chicken wings has caused chicken wing prices to fluctuate more than a roller coaster at Six Flags, and the peak always comes just before the big game. In 2009 Sam Musolino, owner of Sammy’s Pizzeria in Niagara Falls, New York made headlines across the country for trying to lead a chicken wing boycott. Musolino told local and national news affiliates the 40-pound box of wings he normally buys for $46 jumps to $85 before Super Sunday. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average wholesale price of wings in 2009 was $1.47 per pound, up 38% from 2008 (over the same period of time, the average price for a boiler chicken went down 2.6%). The trend has continued into 2010, with chicken wing prices fluctuating between $1.75 to $1.65 per pound, while boneless chicken breast have held steady at $1.56 per pound.

PMQ Pizza Magazine | News Room.

Canadian dining chain Wild Wing announced an aggressive expansion strategy Friday, with plans to immediately open 30 more locations just two days after a U.S. competitor by a similar name said it was coming to Canada.

Wild Wing, an Ontario-based company specializing in flavoured chicken wings, already has 70 restaurants open and plans to make it more than 100 by year’s end. Within three years that number could double with eateries planned for Alberta, B.C. and the East Coast, the franchise said Friday.

 

Wild Wing also plans to go ahead with a formal legal claim with respect to its name “denouncing unabashed attempts to take advantage of Wild Wing good will through bad faith conduct misleading Wild Wing franchisees.”

“Wild Wing is the number one chicken wing brand in Canada and attributes this success to the strength and image of the Wild Wing brand,” founder Rick Smiciklas said in the release.

Just this week, Minneapolis, Minn.-based Buffalo Wild Wings formally announced plans to open 50 restaurants on this side of the border over the next few years starting with locations in Southern Ontario.

A spokesperson from Wild Wing was unable to confirm whether legal action is in response to Buffalo Wild Wings’ arrival to Canada. More details will be available at a Sept. 1 press conference, she said.

Smiciklas who started the privately owned business back in 1999 with only $100 in a failed business account and $600 loan from his mother-in-law. He used the money to take lease on a small-town Ontario restaurant and received bank financing to get the business up and running.

Watch Sharon Singleton’s interview with Buffalo Wild Wings CEO Sally Smith

 

Canadian chicken wing franchise defends turf and name

“As we saw on Wednesday, there’s plenty of anti-meat “news” flying around out there in desperate need of context. Thankfully, today we came across a welcome reprieve from the typical drumbeat that feeds the “go veg” propagandists at animal rights groups. What’s the big news? NPR reports that eating meat is what allowed early humans to, well, become modern people:

Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.

It wasn’t a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks.

“You can’t have a large brain and big guts at the same time,” explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor’s body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers. Until, that is, we discovered meat. …

As we got more, our guts shrank because we didn’t need a giant vegetable processor any more. Our bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello.

So here’s an interesting mental exercise: If the animal-rights PETA activists built a time machine, would they stop early man from ever eating meat and becoming modern man? (Hmmm.) But anyway, it’s perfectly fine with us if the vegan activists at HSUS and PETA would prefer to “evolve” to a meatless diet, but they shouldn’t try to force the rest of us to follow suit. Meat has its place in today’s healthy diet—something that’s apparently been true for millions of years.”

Darwin and Chicken Wings