This Shredded Buffalo Chicken Wrap Recipe Brings The Heat

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Buffalo chicken wings are a wonderful thing, but they are not the easiest food to make at home, nor are they the most nutritious. This shredded Buffalo chicken wrap brings all of the flavors you love from a plate of wings to a meal that is both easy to pack for lunch and a bit lighter. All that Buffalo chicken flavor in a meal that you can bring to work with you? That's hard to argue with.

At its core, Buffalo chicken is about the sauce. In this recipe, we start with the basics, butter and Frank's Red Hot — which is all there was to the original recipe — but we class things up with a touch of honey for sweetness, garlic powder for oomph, and Worcestershire for a layer of umami complexity. Mixed into shredded chicken, it's already delicious. But we don't stop there. Buffalo wings demand some crunchy vegetables, so diced carrots and celery go into the chicken as well. At this point, you can think of it almost as a Buffalo chicken salad.

To qualify as a wrap, the chicken needs to go inside a large flour tortilla — but it shouldn't be alone in there. A crunchy lettuce leaf and a couple of tomato slices complete the wrap qualifications, but the finishing touches on the Buffalo wing experience come in the form of blue cheese crumbles and a drizzle of ranch dressing. All together, it is a plate of wings wrapped up in a tortilla (and a perfect lunch).

For the Buffalo sauce in this recipe, you will need butter, Frank's Red Hot, garlic powder, Worcestershire sauce, and honey. For the wraps, you will need shredded chicken — you can poach chicken breast yourself or shred a rotisserie chicken — diced carrots, diced celery, large flour tortillas, green leaf lettuce, tomato slices, blue cheese crumbles, and ranch dressing. Once you have those ingredients together, you're only a few minutes of cooking, mixing, and rolling away from a delicious meal.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium-low heat.

Once melted, stir in the Frank's Red Hot, Worcestershire, honey, and garlic powder until well-combined. Remove from heat.

Add the shredded chicken to a mixing bowl and pour over the sauce. Stir to combine.

Mix the diced carrot and celery into the chicken as well.

Construct the wraps by placing a lettuce leaf in the center of a tortilla. Top that with two tomato slices, one-fourth of the chicken, a sprinkling of blue cheese crumbles, and a drizzle of ranch dressing.

Roll up the wraps and slice them in half before serving.

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While the exact origins of Buffalo wings and their signature sauce is a strict family secret, many believe they've puzzled out the original recipe. It's a simple one: melted butter and Frank's Red Hot sauce. But the beauty of cooking is, as revelatory as deep-fried chicken wings with Buffalo sauce was, there are 10,000 cooks who are going to work on making it better — or, at least, different. This isn't to say that Frank's Red Hot isn't perfect for Buffalo wings. It's the original, and it's wonderful. But should you find yourself without access to the primeval cayenne coulis, you have options.

To choose the right replacement for Frank's Red Hot, first, we need to nail down what kind of sauce Frank's is. It is a cayenne pepper sauce with a good vinegar tang. Frank's hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, but as far as classification goes, it is closest in heat and flavor to a Louisiana-style hot sauce. In fact, the brand Louisiana Hot is very similar to Frank's Red Hot. Both are made with aged cayenne peppers, distilled vinegar, and salt. The big difference? Frank's adds some garlic powder.

If you can't get your hands on a bottle of Frank's Red Hot, just grab another Louisiana-style hot sauce instead. You could go with the Louisiana Hot brand mentioned or opt for another like Crystal, Dave Chang's favorite hot sauce. So long as it's Louisiana-style, it will work just fine.

No plate of wings is complete without a side of crunchy vegetables (typically celery and carrots), and some kind of creamy sauce, such as blue cheese or ranch dressing. As it turns out, the real reason wings come with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing may have been simply that there were extras of both laying around the kitchen when Buffalo wings hit a plate for the first time. But regardless of how they ended up there, the pairing is both wonderful and now fully cemented in the culinary bible. But what kind of blue cheese should you choose?

Given how many flavors are coming together in this recipe, the blue cheese is not going to show through too much. It adds a lovely piquancy to the wrap — a salty bite sneaking through from time to time — but it is not a dominant flavor when pitted against the Buffalo sauce. So, our suggestion is to stay away from anything too fancy or expensive. There are many unique blue cheeses out there, and some of them can carry a hefty price tag. For this recipe, opt for something inexpensive and crumbly.

Gorgonzola, Roquefort, and Stilton are crumbly blue cheeses that can often be found for a reasonable price, and would make excellent additions to this wrap. But the cheapest option available is likely the unspecified "blue cheese crumbles" at the grocery store. It is inexpensive, crumbly, and plenty good enough to pair with ranch dressing and Buffalo sauce.

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