RCP: A version of Sal's Sauce.

For those of you who have lived in upstate NY -- Rochester, Syracuse, Oswego, etc. -- you may know about a chicken franchise called Sal's Birdland. My college friends and I just love the stuff. We'd walk there during blizzards. We chat with the staff about how they run the place. We met Sal!

Anyway, one friend of mine spent years, off and on, guessing at the ingredients and the cooking method to make Sal's sauce. Eventually, he got pretty good at it. Here is the final form of his work (I have several handwritten versions from him).

This is a sweet-sour-hot sauce best for throwing over roast/fried chicken, shrimp, ribs after they are cooked but it can be used on the grill, too:

3 cups cider vinegar
1 cup water
1-1/2 cups light brown sugar
1-1/2 cups white sugar
2 navel oranges, sliced
6 tbs black pepper
1 tbs Coleman's dry mustard
2 cups (French's) yellow mustard
1-1/2 cups honey
1/2 cup Frank's Louisiana Hot Sauce
1 tbs salt
small jar crushed red pepper
3 tbs cornstarch

1. Add everything but cornstarch in large pot and simmer without boiling 2 hours.
2. Mix some sauce from the pot with the cornstarch until smooth, then stir back into pot.

This makes about 4-5 pints of sauce.

A few fine points:
-- The brand of hot sauce matters a lot. Others will be good but Frank's matches our memories.
-- The "small jar" is probably 4-6 tbsp. Adjust to suit your taste for hot.
-- Do not cover the pot; you must not caramelize the sugars. Final sauce is yellow.

You can process and seal in jars. It keeps forever in the fridge, too.

Let me know if you try it/like it.


Jeff

Thanks Jeff. I will try it one of these days. Do the naval oranges remain as full size, circular slices?

Generally, but it's not critical. After a long simmer they are nearly falling apart, anyway. So, feel free to cut into quarter-circles.

I never learned to like Sal's (or Smitty's - wasn't there some rivalry?) but I understand the walking in a snowstorm part. Personally, I'll take a good Buffalo wing, but wouldn't try making them at home.

Yes, there was a rivalry between Sal's and Smitty's. Sal's only has two store-fronts open nowadays though he bottles the sauce and sells it in several states. I can't find any trace of Smitty's on the internet. Nick Tahou, if you remember him, has become a cottage industry: many locations.

Ah, Sal's.

The store near campus used to sell 200 lbs of gizzards a week. Doused in sauce, of course. But still... that's a lot of gizzards.

The charm, as it were, of Nick Tahou's was its W Main St. location at about 3am. The only way to enjoy a garbage plate is in the company of pimps and dealers. Once they moved to the burbs I couldn't imagine going there. Last fall I had a very nice meal in Rochester at a bustling place called Good Luck in what they used to call Village Gate on N. Goodman. Didn't get a chance to see if Sal's or Smitty's is still around.

Which of Sal's sauces does this one try to emulate?

"Sassy", the original.

[Jenise]

So this is an AFTER sauce, not a marinade? That's a new approach, for me.

All this grilled chicken talk got me going yesterday. I broke down a whole bird, saving the breasts for an occasion in the future and dumping the rest of the parts in a bag with half a (large) bottle of Tabasco sauce. We'll have that tonight.

Btw, I don't have any special love for Tabasco sauce as a hot sauce per se, but it works fabulously as a chicken marinade. Got the idea from Karen on this board, and where I think hers involved mixing the Tabasco with sour cream or yoghurt, can't recall which, I found I like the direct, undiluted flavor of pure Tabasco. Which matches the flavor of an old bar food favorite, so works for me like your college memories work for you--it's an essential flavor of my past that I enjoy revisiting.

All this grilled chicken talk got me going yesterday.

Me too...talk about the power of suggestion. Yesterday I got out 14 chicken thighs and jerk marinated them overnight and today I'll smoke em on the egg.

DRew

Yes, generally speaking, it is thrown on AFTER, not during the cooking. Sal's birds are cooked by a combination of fry and steaming, for those who need to know.

It's too tart for a dipping sauce, however. One really must go all in.