Silky Smooth 15 Minute Homemade Buffalo Sauce

A 15-minute Frank’s Buffalo Wing Sauce copycat recipe

If there’s one way to make crispy baked chicken wings extra delicious, it’s by dousing or dipping them in this homemade Buffalo Sauce. The smoky, vinegary flavors are sensational and it’s easy to make from scratch!

All you need to make homemade buffalo wing sauce are 7 pantry-staple ingredients. With a medium heat level, you’ll taste a bit of a kick but won’t be overwhelmed. But if you really don’t want a lot of heat, go ahead and customize the recipe to find your perfect level.

I’m a huge fan of Frank’s Wing Sauce and, after a bunch of tests, this recipe is as close to the real thing as possible. I hope you love it as much as I do!

Ingredients

Buffalo sauce ingredients are very simple, and likely in your kitchen already. You need a variety of spices, butter, and a shortlist of other items to put it together:

Unsalted butter

Butter is a key ingredient in homemade buffalo sauce recipes because it cools down the spice from the cayenne hot sauce and gives it its signature smooth mouthfeel. 

Using unsalted butter, specifically, will result in a well-balanced wing sauce. The hot sauce used later on in the recipe contains a ton of salt, and using salted butter will result in an overly-salty condiment. You’ll have a lot more control over the saltiness with unsalted butter, plus you can always add an extra pinch at the end if needed.

Smoky spices

You’ll already find garlic powder, paprika, and cayenne in the Frank’s Wing Sauce ingredients, which is why I incorporated them into this recipe. The garlic and paprika help round out the flavor while cayenne adds the heat! 

This buffalo sauce recipe has a medium heat level but you can make it milder by using only 1 teaspoon of cayenne. If you want it really spicy, use up to 4 teaspoons of cayenne pepper.

Hot sauce

But not just any hot sauce! You need a vinegar-based cayenne hot sauce, like Frank’s hot sauce or Crystal. Do not use a buffalo wing sauce, since that’s already what we’re making.

Cayenne hot sauce should be easy to find in most well-stocked grocery stores. Feel free to pick up a few different brands to experiment with the balance of flavor.

Distilled vinegar

White distilled vinegar is a key ingredient in spicy wing sauce recipes. The acidic tang brightens up the sauce and adds a necessary balance to the otherwise strong and spicy ingredients.

I tested this recipe with other types of vinegar but they didn’t offer the same satisfying punchiness as white vinegar. Try not to skip it!

Sugar

A little bit of granulated sugar adds a touch of sweetness to the sauce.

How to make buffalo sauce from scratch

Making buffalo sauce for wings is easy! Just follow these simple steps:

Tips to make the best sauce

These 3 key tips will help you make the best buffalo sauce:

Blooming your spices is a must! 

Blooming, or tempering, is a South Asian cooking technique that involves frying ground or whole spices in fat. Bon Appetit describes the process as drawing the shy flavors of the spices out of their shell.

It may sound like an unnecessary step to fry the dried spices in melted butter in the beginning of this recipe, but it’s crucial to achieve a complex, standout buffalo sauce. 

Strain the spices out of the melted butter

Skipping this step is the best way to end up with grainy wing sauce. Pour the melted butter with the spices into a bowl through a fine mesh sieve before adding the rest of the ingredients. This way, your buffalo wing sauce will be ultra-smooth without missing out of the savory and smoky flavors you infused earlier.

Whisking constantly

It sounds tedious, but whisking the spices as they bloom in the butter prevents them from burning. Also, whisking as you’re pouring the hot sauce into the infused butter helps the sauce come together and emulsify. Skipping this step could lead to an oily and broken sauce.

Make ahead and storing

The sauce can easily be made up to 5 days ahead of serving. Pour it into an airtight jar or container and store it in the fridge. When it’s time to eat, reheat the sauce in a saucepan over medium-low heat, whisking constantly, until it’s warmed through.

Recipe