From the food editor: Locally made Buffalo sauce scores big points
Don't bother Dave Weiss on Super Bowl Sunday.
It's not that the Glenview dad will be so entrenched in the action on the gridiron, it's that he'll be entrenched with the action in the kitchen of Gator's Wing Shack, the Palatine restaurant he runs with brother-in-law Neil Jolcover.
“It's by far our busiest day of the year,” Weiss said. “We sold 8,500 wings last year; we anticipate 10,000 wings this year. It's awesome and crazy. People have already started preordering.”
The following is not without reason — the restaurant, which is marking its 19th year; 14th in Palatine — is a four-time Best of the Fest winner at Wing Fest (Feb. 22 this year; wingfest.net).
“It's a combination of our sauce and quality of our chicken,” Weiss says about the restaurant's winning streak. “We're relentlessly consistent.”
That drive for consistency meant it was a long road getting Gator's two varieties of Buffalo sauce onto store shelves. Gator's Original Buffalo Sauce and its Garlic Buffalo Sauce cost $4.99 to $6.99 at stores around the suburbs including Sunset Foods, EuroFresh, Haybeck's Meat Market, Caputo's and Fresh Thyme.
“We had a lot of customers who would come in and we would sell them sauce in Styrofoam containers ... they pushed us to bottle it. It took a while to get it right.”
He said the ingredients in the 12-ounce bottles are identical to what comes out of the restaurant kitchen. The recipe calls for real butter, fresh garlic and no sugar or gluten.
So if you'd rather make wings at home come Sunday, Weiss is OK with that, as long as you use his sauce, of course.
“Buy your wings from a good butcher, and bake or grill them. Once they're finished, heat up the sauce, on the stove or in the microwave, just warm it up, and pour it over the cooked chicken. It's also good on pork chops or fish or in chicken salad. My wife puts it in pasta. The garlic sauce is really good in mac and cheese. You don't need a lot of it.”
Buffalo Chicken Mac and Cheese? I just found my Super Bowl Sunday dinner.
More over apples: As you drag a chip (baked, of course) through that big bowl of guacamole, pat yourself on the back with the other hand. You're fighting bad cholesterol.
Research recently published in the Journal of the American Heart Association showed that eating an avocado a day as part of a heart-healthy, cholesterol-lowering moderate-fat diet can help improve bad cholesterol levels in overweight and obese individuals.
Researchers put 45 healthy, overweight or obese patients between the ages of 21 and 70 on three different cholesterol-lowering diets. Patients consumed an average American diet for two weeks prior to starting one of the following cholesterol-lowering diets: lower-fat diet without avocado, moderate-fat diet without avocado and moderate-fat diet with one avocado per day. After the diet period, researchers found that those who followed the avocado-a-day diet had lower LDL (“bad”) cholesterol than other study participants.
If you don't want to eat guacamole every day (though seriously, why wouldn't you!), dice avocados into a green lettuce salad or a bowl of cooked, cooled quinoa and black beans, or mash and smear onto toast in lieu of mayo (this approach is especially good with bacon and tomato). Batter and bake them (fried green tomato style), or purée and fold into quick bread or muffin batter or try avocado in Annie Overboe's Avocado Brownie. Guiltless goodness!
• Contact Food Editor Deborah Pankey at dpankey@dailyherald.com or (847) 427-4524. Be her friend at Facebook.com/DebPankey.DailyHerald or follow her on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter @PankeysPlate.