One of the best finds from this past Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire was the wing sauces from the fine folks at Bonfatto’s. Hailing from smack dab in the middle of Pennsylvania, Bonfatto’s is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from State College…which was once a possible relocation destination for us. Anyhow, Bonfatto’s made their WoF debut this year and brought along their entire line of yummy wing sauces. After making our way down the line, we selected this one as a favorite that we wanted to use for our very own.

Admittedly, while we may eat a fair amount of chicken wings…we don’t make them ourselves. We have a deep fryer that we have used before to do that, but it makes such an unholy mess that we have semi-permanently retired it. Besides that, who wants to have to dispose of all of that vegetable oil on a regular basis?! Anyhow, we wanted to give this sauce a fair shake, so we decided to get some already-cooked plain chicken wings from our local wing-ding place and would cook ‘em up to taste. About the sauce:

Ingredients: pepper sauce (aged red peppers, distilled vinegar, salt, garlic) unsalted butter, honey, spices, garlic powder, natural flavors

So what we did was take a bunch of cooked wings and dumped them into a large tupperware container then poured the wing sauce over them. The wings were shaken to coat them liberally with sauce, then they were emptied into a baking pan and covered with aluminum foil. The wings were then heated at a mere 180 degrees in the oven for about 30 minutes to cook the sauce into them and then served straight from the oven. The above pic is what they looked like!

As for taste, we gave them two sauce-stained thumbs-up. True that the base flavor had a Frank’s Red Hot quality to them, but the depth of flavor was much better than that. The heat level was moderate, perhaps 6/10 for our palates. These wings were addictingly-good and the party members who tried them seem to universally like them, assuming the heat level did not overwhelm their tasting sensibilities. It IS a spicy wing sauce. Chileheads will not be overwhelmed by any stretch of the imagination, but the uninitiated should be warned before they go whole-hog into a bucket of wings coated in this sauce.

Not being ones to totally conform to a given use for a product, I made a sandwich with some of the leftover sauce in the bottle. As a condiment, it was pretty darn tasty on a sandwich too. If you can handle a little of that vinegary tartness in the food, then this sauce has some possibilities beyond coating your fave batch of chicken wings.

Overall recommendation: While not the most original wing sauce in the world, it is a really tasty sauce which is above-average in quality. Being fairly spicy, an average chilehead would likely be quite pleased with a batch of wings coated in this sauce. As for us, our bottle is empty…and we are sad for that. If that ain’t a ringing endorsement, then we don’t know what is. Get some and enjoy it for yourself!