When eating chicken wings, boneless or not, the sauce can make or break your experience. Whether you can’t handle extreme sauces or need more sweetness to enjoy your food, a good sauce is a vessel for coating your wings with extra flavor and uniqueness. Buffalo Wild Wings, one of the most popular wing spots out there, has a plethora of sauces to choose from. But which ones are the best, and maybe more importantly, which ones should you avoid? We put this to the test by tasting and ranking 24 different Buffalo Wild Wings’ sauces, and while we thought the original buffalo was superior, lemon pepper was the biggest disappointment, coming in last on our list.
We recommend avoiding this sauce because of how unpleasantly sweet the lemon flavor was, which overshadowed the barely present pepper. After all, what’s a lemon pepper wing without the pepper? Wings with just a lemon sauce aren’t common, and this is one example of why. Additionally, the texture of Buffalo Wild Wings’ sauce was a bit too oily, and there was not enough balance between thin and thick. Sadly, the lemon pepper was a bust, but there are ways to improve the sauce so that the wing chain (and even you, if you make it at home) can follow.
Making Buffalo Wild Wings’ lemon pepper better
Lemon pepper, which was first popularized in Atlanta, is a sauce that depends on a good balance of tangy, acidic, sweet, and savory. Buffalo Wild Wings presumably added more sugar or lemon flavoring than what was needed, which took over the sauce completely. When making any sauce, it’s good to add other savory notes to make sure the strong profiles of acidity and sweetness are toned down to a pleasant combination.
So, if you’re craving some lemon pepper wings and decide to make them yourself, try a recipe that includes a good amount of garlic powder, onion powder, and a more natural sweetener, such as honey, which will complement a savory sauce. This recipe for lemon pepper wings in the air fryer does this well. It includes a dry rub and a savory, sticky sauce that will coat wings to perfection and pack them with lots of flavor. However, recipe developer Joe Dillard warns not to be “heavy-handed” with citrus to prevent too much of a sour flavor.
If you don’t mind a dry rub, Buffalo Wild Wings’ competitor, Wingstop, offers a lemon pepper flavor that is one of its most popular and well-received. However, if you still find yourself at Buffalo Wild Wings, stick with the more classic flavors and you’ll be golden.
