You Can Upgrade Hot Sauce With Just Two Ingredients

For those who love a little spice, hot sauce is a game-changer for bland food. What's great about hot sauce is that it can widely vary in levels of spice. Hot sauce is rated on the Scoville Scale, which measures the heat of chili peppers and scores them on a Scoville heat unit scale (per Scoville Scale). For reference, jalapeño peppers are listed on the mild hot level, ringing in around 2,000 Scoville units. Currently, the hottest chili pepper on the Scoville scale is the Carolina Reaper, which is rated at 2.2 million SHUs (via Love My Chillies).

When you head into your local grocery store, there are hundreds of different brands of hot sauces that will deliver a slew of different tastes and heat levels. Buffalo hot sauce is often synonymous with chicken wings and is usually served with ranch or blue cheese dressing for a cooling effect (per Fansided). Fast-food chicken chains, like KFC, even jumped on the buffalo craze with its hybrid buffalo ranch sauce. While you can purchase a hot sauce for your wings, there are a few additions that will take your wings to the next level.

Food Network chef Sunny Anderson spilled the secrets when it comes to upgrading store-bought hot sauce. In a video from her cooking show, Anderson heats up her hot sauce with some butter and a squeeze of lemon. She explains that the butter helps tone down some of the heat while adding some richness from the fat. The squeeze of lemon helps brighten the sauce and bring back some tang. When she coats the chicken wings, the sauce is bright, shiny, and just calling to be eaten.

If you're cooking buffalo sauce, there's an additional secret ingredient that will turn the flavor up a notch. Take a head of garlic and roast it in the oven until it's soft and caramelized. According to Food 52, when roasted garlic is added to the sauce it adds some umami and depth of flavor. You can, of course, pour buffalo sauce over chicken, but it also makes a great sauce for vegan buffalo cauliflower wings or buffalo chicken dip.