Spicy Wings? - Mac's Brew Bar

I've had to include the question mark as there was some confusion amongst us as to what type of wings we had actually received when they arrived at our table.

One menu had BBQ Wings listed, another had Spicy Wings.  I was hoping for the Spicy Wings as I remembered having something almost cajun spiced here one time a while ago which was really tasty.  The trouble is these were a little bit BBQ tasting and spicy at the same time, so who really knows what we received.

The wings were cooked very well, with a nice crispy skin and juicy tender meat inside.  The sauce - whether spicy or BBQ was sticky and tangy and just salty enough to encourage a thirst for beer.  The only thing I thought was a bit pointless was the presentation on top of mesclun.  Other people might want things fancied up a bit, but when i'm ordering wings all I really want is chicken, vegetables just get in the way.

Still, its not hard to recommend them - and now that it's summer Mac's really does have one of the best locations for a mid-afternoon beverage, have the wings and make it four or five.

Hot Samoan Boys Chilli Sauce

I think I might be running out of ways to describe the various hot sauces i've been trying.  But if there's one word that sums this one up its hot.  Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot!  I don't know what makes the heat the most dominant flavour, it doesn't have any smokiness like Huffman's does, and none of the fruitier notes that the Kaitaia fire had, mostly it just has heat.

Its made up primarily from birds-eye chillis which may explain things, and has a lower vinegar content than many of the others i've had of late.  Still it's hard to say it was anything other than good but not great.  As you can see I knew ahead of time that this was going to be hot so had a wimpy half of my usual portion size.

And lastly, good news on the wings front - you can now buy packs of free range wings rather than having to go the supermarket and get a tray of some of the poorer quality chicken.  Moore Wilson's stocks these and you get about 6 wings worth of nibbles for around $6 I think, so reasonable value.

Kaitaia Fire

We seem to have a lot of companies making hot sauce in my beautiful land these days, but to memory Kaitaia Fire has been around for longer than most.  Back in the long long ago, the only one you could get was Tabasco, and i'm sure Kaitaia Fire was the first that popped up to challenge that dominance.

This was my first time making wings in the oven at my new place, and the good news is that it can crank the heat nicely to get the skin nice and crispy.  I think I fluked it actually as the flesh was still super tender & juicy, and that's without doing Alton Brown's steam & then roast method too.

Having said that, perhaps it was an omen that smoke began to emanate from the oven & our fire alarms went off.  I didn't read the bottle, but that might have just increased the fear!  You see, Kaitaia Fire appears to be the first of these hot sauces where Chillis are the predominant ingredient.  First up on the label, Chillis (55%)!  Everything else leads with vinegar or water, so this may well explain just how hot this hot sauce was.

Still, despite the almost blistering sensation you sometimes get on your lips the adrenaline helped me burst on through and actually it was super tasty, this is one of my favourites so far.  The first thing that hits you is the heat, the vinegar is a lot more subtle than others i've tried.  The chilli flavour is right at the forefront as well, its almost a little sweet, but doesn't really have the smokiness of others that I have tried.

All up, this was delicious and i'm sad to have had to finish the bottle, but I needed to clear some room for a shipment of new sauces winging their way to me!

Buffalo Wings with 4-pack of Hot Sauce

A buddy of mine is quite probably more chilli mad than I am.  To the extent that he's made his own hot sauces and had a hell of a lot more success at growing chillis too.  I knew that he'd be keen to eat Buffalo Wings with me at some point, and when he told me he'd been given a variety pack of different hot sauces I had an idea.

I turned up at his place with two trays of chicken wings, and proceeded to break them down into the winglets.  It worked out to be bang on 6 wings per sauce which I know sounds a lot of wings but it was being split amongst six folk so I promise we weren't being too greedy.  To try to maintain some balance in these reviews i'm being consistent with the amount of sauce, so I measured out 2 tablespoons of each in advance of the cooking.

Then it was just a matter of coming to grips with a new oven, getting the wings cooked and then deciding in which order to consume the wings.  I ended up cooking in two batches and made a guess that the colouring matched the DEFCON system where Green is less severe than Yellow, which again is less severe than Red.

We started out with the Feel it Burn & the Slightly Spicy.  The green sauce was quite fruity in flavour, not especially acidic, and didn't feel too hot either.  The yellow was very mild and maybe a little bland in comparison.  Both were well seasoned and i'd made a good call not to season the chicken as the sauces were doing a fine job of handling that themselves.

  

Then, because neither sauce raised a sweat and we had an interregnum while the second batch cooked, we got a bit adventurous.  Sometime ago, my pal had purchased a small bottle of a fearsome sounding chilli sauce, "Dragon's Fury".  This hellacious sounding brew is made of the second hottest chilli on the planet, so we approached it with some trepidation.

Ok, a lot of trepidation.  We sampled the sauce on small cubes of cheddar, starting with a small dot of the sauce and then, gaining in courage, advancing to basically dunking the cheese.  While I'm not going to claim I could swallow a teaspoon of it, it didn't give out too much of a burn.  there didn't seem to be a huge amount of flavour either, but then I noticed that my whole mouth had gone numb.  

Only then did the heat kick in, more of a deep, slow burn than the sharp heat of other chillis.  I guess due to the wiseness of starting in small quantities and never going large there wasn't any suffering, the effects actually wore off before we got to the remaining two batches of wings, accompanied by the Heating Up and the Rising Heat.

 

These two were my favourite of the sauces, being different heat levels of the same thing.  Tangy from the vinegar, very savoury and somewhat hot.  I say somewhat, because it turns out that the green sauce was supposedly the hottest of the lot though I honestly couldn't tell.

Where the experiment probably fell down was in the cooking of the 2nd lot of wings, I didn't get it right and so didn't get the crispiness that makes them amazing.  Still, the chicken was fall of the bone tender so that's a positive in its own, and the sauces were pretty good too.  Only, as they were given as a gift we have no idea where you could purchase them.

The Louisiana Hotsauce is still my favourite to date; but the theatrics of four different bowls of wings in one go made this a more memorable event.

Buffalo Wings with Louisiana Hot Sauce

Ever since I did my first post on Huffman's Hot Sauce I've been trying to decide when it was ok to do the next.  I think i'm growing addicted to chilli sauces, in fact just sitting here typing this my mouth is watering at the memory and i'm tempted to sneak into the fridge with a teaspoon for another hit of Louisiana Hot Sauce.

This sauce has a reasonable heat to it, though its tamer than the Huffman's, but the chilli flavour is superb.  The vinegar cuts through the fattiness of the chicken with ease, and there's a really strong and sweet savoury note.  It might sound like a weird comparison but its almost a marmite like savoury flavour, and that's not a bad thing at all.

I'm not sure its got a huge variety of uses ahead of it, but then you don't select a cricket team of all-rounders, its ok to have specialists.  And hell, eating plate after plate of Buffalo Wings adorned with this sauce doesn't sound like a bad thing to me!