Buffalo sauce

A finishing sauce, not a pepper sauce

Buffalo sauce is a warm finishing sauce made by combining a cayenne hot sauce with melted butter. The pepper sauce supplies the heat and the acid; the butter gives it richness, a cling to the skin of fried food and a smoother texture than the thin bottled pepper sauce it starts from. The sauce is a separate study from the acidic pepper sauce it uses, and the bottled hot sauce has different storage needs from the finished blend.

The sauce is tossed onto hot fried chicken wings, and the account notes that Worcestershire sauce and garlic powder are common additions.

The Anchor Bar account

The most widely repeated origin is the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, where Teressa Bellissimo, who ran the bar with her husband Frank, is credited with the wing in 1964. Wings were then cheap and often discarded, and she is said to have fried them and tossed them in hot sauce, classically Frank's RedHot, mixed with melted butter and vinegar.

The details are disputed. Teressa's son Dominic told The New Yorker in 1980 that she made a snack on a Friday night for unexpected visitors. Frank Bellissimo's account is that wings arrived by mistake instead of backs and necks for spaghetti sauce. A 1969 local newspaper article on the Anchor Bar did not mention wings, while the rival Duff's began selling them that year. John Young claims he served breaded wings with a tomato-based Mumbo sauce from 1961, and says the Anchor Bar did not add wings to its menu until 1974.

Why the butter matters

The butter is the difference between a pepper sauce and buffalo sauce. It softens the sharpness of the cayenne, holds the sauce to the surface of the wing, and makes it pourable and warm. The account gives no ratio, so a cook judges by taste and by how the sauce coats the wing.

Serving and storage

This sauce is a warm finishing blend for coating hot, cooked wings; the source does not provide a storage duration for the butter-based mixture. If any is saved, USDA leftover guidance says to refrigerate it within 2 hours, or within 1 hour if exposed above 90°F (32°C), in a shallow covered container at 40°F (4°C) or below. Use refrigerated leftovers within 3 to 4 days or freeze for longer storage. These are general leftover-handling limits, not a tested shelf life for this sauce. The finished butter blend is not the same as shelf-stable bottled hot sauce, and this method is not a canning process.