Remember, I did not grow up around these parts, and that means I don’t have a lifetime of experience with buffalo wings and their classic accompaniments.
It’s an interesting exercise to think back to when I had my first encounter with buffalo wings. Memory is a funny thing, but my best guess is that it was when I lived in Miami, most likely when I was in high school. It was certainly during my late teens that I fell in love with the crispy, fiery, and juicy combination of flavors and textures that I still enjoy today.
However, the wings I fell in love with were not buffalo wings at all, because they were most definitely breaded. And while I may still have a soft spot in my heart for crisply fried breaded wings tossed with hot sauce, I have a much deeper love for the unbreaded wings more widely available throughout the Capital Region.
One of the issues that came up on the most recent Tour de Wings was the wide range of different opinions on the blue cheese dip that is served with the wings. Today, I was hoping to get a few people to weigh in on the matter, just so I can gain a bit more perspective on the form.
Here’s the spectrum of blue cheese dip as I see it.
On the far left you have shelf-stable, bottled blue cheese salad dressing. It’s sweet. It’s gloppy. There aren’t many chunks, and it’s not that assertive. It’s kind of like mayonnaise, thinned down with vinegar and water, and blended with blue cheese.
On the far right, you have something that has big chunks of blue cheese, suspended in sour cream, with only as much vinegar and buttermilk as needed to brighten all that fat and create the consistency of a dip. But the experience is dairy on dairy. Without the oily sheen of commercial mayonnaise to mute the flavor or dull the texture.
It’s the later that I make at home for the Super Bowl, although I shudder to think how many bottles of shelf stable blue cheese dressing are sold every year, and how many are consumed during the Super Bowl alone.
Of course there are all kinds of shades of blue along the way, because chunkier refrigerated commercial dressings are a step up from what one might find along the aisles. Then there are the home made blue cheese dips with blue cheese crumbles and mayonnaise, enriched with maybe some sour cream and buttermilk.
The spectrum from left to right would seem to be all about increasing chunks of more assertive cheese, decreasing levels of mayonnaise, and increasing levels of sour cream and the use of buttermilk.
What was interesting was that there seemed to be disagreement from the eaters on the tour as to which dips had higher proportions of mayonnaise. So now I question whether this is a matter people as a whole can even discern just based on sensory perceptions. I wonder how I would do if tasting blue cheese dips blindly. Would I be able to line them up from the least mayonnaise content to the most?
How about you?
Because bottled blue cheese dressings are crazy popular. It’s what most people eat and enjoy. There is no shame in that. This is comfort food, after all, and we each draw comfort from different sources.
For the record, I have nothing against mayonnaise either. I love the stuff. But I just happen to love the blue cheese dip I make without it more than versions that contain that deliciously silky egg and oil emulsion.
So, where do you stand on the spectrum? And what do you think is the more traditional accompaniment?