The Super Bowl and a Platter of Chicken Wings

A Buffalo wing, hot wing or wing is a chicken wing section that is traditionally deep-fried unbreaded and then coated in sauce. Classic Buffalo-style chicken wing sauce is composed of a vinegar-based cayenne pepper hot sauce and butter. Buffalo wings are traditionally served with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing.

• The flat pieces are called “flats” or “wings,” while the ones that look like miniature drumsticks are called “drummettes”
• In 1964, Teressa Bellissimo of the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, N.Y., became the first person to deep-fry a batch of chicken wings and serve them coated in hot sauce with a side of blue cheese dressing and celery sticks.
• In 1977, the mayor of Buffalo declared July 29 “Chicken Wing Day” to honor Teressa and her husband, Frank. In 2003, the restaurant received a James Beard Foundation Award, which is reserved for restaurants considered “American classics.”
• Currently the Anchor Bar dishes up more than a thousand pounds of wings per day.
• For those health conscience folks, the original Anchor Bar recipe has 567 calories and 48 grams of fat for four wings dipped in blue cheese.  If you eat a dozen of those wings by yourself, you’re sucking down 2268 calories.  You would have to eat 19 chicken breasts to get the same amount of fat as a dozen buffalo wings.
• Joey Chestnut set a record unlikely to be surpassed when he ate 241 in a half-hour time.
• 101-pound Sonya Thomas, also known as “Black Widow,” ate 165 wings in 12 minutes at the U.S. Buffalo Wing Eating Championship.
• The National Chicken Council (NCC) says that Super Bowl weekend is the biggest time of the year for wings. More than 1.25 billion wing portions will be consumed during Super Bowl weekend in 2012, totaling more than 100 million pounds of wings.
• 22 percent of the Super Bowl audience eats Chicken wings (compared to 17 percent for Pizza and 9 percent for burgers, hot dogs and brats).

 (ed. – We had fun with this subject last night. Check the posts on our Facebook page.)