"Forget Buffalo; Think Mango and Maple"
By Rick Allen
Next year, chicken wings will be 50 years old. Not that chickens didn't have wings before that, but it was in 1964 according to legend, when Teressa Bellisimo broiled a batch of wings destined for the next day's stock pot and created today's universal appetizer - Buffalo wings, named because her Anchor Bar was in Buffalo, N.Y.
In the ensuing half-century, wings have gone from the least-desirable piece of poultry to the most; on the wholesale market, wings typically are more expensive than any other piece of chicken except boneless and skinless breasts, especially around the Super Bowl - when we eat more than a billion wings, or roughly 100 million pounds, according to the National Chicken Council.
Nearly every restaurant regardless of its primary cuisine typically has wings - in recent years the "Buffalo" has been dropped. And their varied flavors always are the key.
Some places specialize in wings; among them, Wing Zone, which has its roots in Gainesville where a couple of University of Florida fraternity guys - Matt Friedman and Adam Scott - experimented with cooking wings in their house kitchen and sold the results to other students as a way to beat late-night munchies.
They called themselves "flavorholics," and their flavors are repeat winners at the National Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo.
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