For a chilehead, even the simple gastronomic pleasure of spicy chicken wings can be hard to find a good level of satisfaction. Now we’ve written about past frustrations with our local BW3 chain, but the recent TV onslaught of commercials about some new wing sauces gave us hope that we might try again…but just that we would make the wings ourselves and take their questionable preparation out of the equation. What follows is our experience using our spiffy new home deep-fryer…

The big attraction was their new Mango Habanero wing sauce. After noticing their first four ingredients were water, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, and mango juice concentrate, I had serious doubts about the potential for this sauce to be anything that tasted good, let alone hot & spicy. Their Blazin’ sauce, the hottest in their line, is made up of jalapenos, cayenne, and habanero chiles, so the lack of all of these (except the habanero) didn’t make me overly thrilled. Still, we have tried other mango habanero products that have been good, so we gave it the benefit of the doubt beforehand. The other two sauces, Teriyaki and Parmesan Garlic, were meant to appease the gentle palates who’d be eating the wings with us. We “spiked” half the bottle of the Parmesan Garlic, but more on that a littler later.

After one hot oil mishap (nothing was harmed except Joe’s pride), you can see the result of our deep-fry labors. There’s something quite zen about putting hot wings into the wing sauce and mixing up a batch that gives a sense of anticipation no matter whether you’re sure it will be good or not.

A few tasting notes about the non-spicy sauces to consider. The Teriyaki was embrassingly poor-tasting. I seldom bash anything on this blog, but this soy sauce-laden nightmare was repellant to my tongue when I tried it. I’m glad that someone else was willing to eat it, because I couldn’t stomach more than one bite. I could have found some one year-old soy sauce and made a better version myself. ‘Nuff said.

The Parmesan Garlic had a nice flavor to it, but no heat whatsoever. Given that it’s listed with the other mild sauces on BW3’s menu, this should have been a no-brainer. Fortunately for us, it was a good enough starting base to be able to morph it into a sauce fit for a chilehead. Kinda heavy, very dairy-ish, and a little salty, it was like taking a big lick of garlic salt followed by a heaping spoonful of parmesan cheese.

Now these wings were done using half a bottle of the Parmesan Garlic mixed with several heaping spoonfuls of CaJohn’s Select Serrano Puree. A great taste for anything spicy is to see how it can affect anything dairy, and this had a nice garlicky-cheesy taste with a simmering serrano burn. In fact, the amount of Serrano puree we used seemed to help out with the saltiness of the original sauce. Heatwise, it’s not going to wow any chilehead craving heat, but was the runaway winner at this meal in the taste arena.

At last we come to the center of attention, the Mango Habanero wing sauce. Simply putting the word habanero on the bottle doesn’t make it hot, and I was significantly underwhelmed with the heat level. It had some cumulative heat build-up, but nothing like your average habanero-based wing sauce. As for the mango part of it, that really seemed to be the overriding taste. A little too sweet, in my opinion. This sauce idea had such good potential, so it’s a shame that that went unrealized. To put it bluntly, this sauce couldn’t hold the jockstrap of any of the DEFCON sauces on a dare. (Yes, I know they don’t actually have such things…but follow me on the metaphor bandwagon.)

Bottom line…there are simply too many good wing sauces out there to consider using these all that often. If you’re in a pinch, like we were, then take a chance on them. Maybe you’ll like them a bit more than we did. As for me, I’ll wait for some other wing sauces before turning on the deep-fryer again to make wings.

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