Is This The Secret For Making Chick-Fil-A's Signature Sauce?
There are three kinds of people in this world. People who prefer KFC or Popeye's over Chick-fil-A, people who like the restaurant chain, and folks who would eat it every day if possible. Perhaps it's the way that they cook their chicken, using the company tradition of pressure-cooking instead of deep-frying? Maybe it's the thrill of being told "my pleasure" by the cashier when they get their food? Whatever the case may be, Chick-fil-A fans seem to always be on the lookout to try and replicate those unique flavors in their very home.
It seems one of the easiest menu items to replicate is one of the chain's most popular items — their signature sauce. Wide Open Eats, Ranker, and Business Insider all gave the signature Chick-fil-A sauce number one out of all the sauces available at the restaurant. According to The Sun, a Reddit user shared that they worked at a Chick-fil-A in Fredericksburg, Virginia and saw how the sauce was made firsthand. The recipe, he claimed, is a half cup of coleslaw dressing, a quarter cup of barbecue sauce, and one-and-a-half tablespoons of yellow mustard. A surprisingly simple formula for such a popular item, it would seem. But does it hold up when compared to the original story of how the sauce was invented?
Chick-fil-A sauce was invented in Fredericksburg, Virginia
While many fast food restaurants keep their recipes a closely guarded secret, Chick-fil-A is more than happy to share the story of how the famous sauce came to be. According to the chain's website, Hugh Fleming was managing a Chick-fil-A in a mall in Fredericksburg, Virginia sometime in the 1980s. When a group of department store employees asked for a dipping sauce to go alongside their nuggets, Fleming and the other employees noticed that the restaurant didn't have any sauces. Thinking on his feet, Fleming remembered an old honey mustard recipe and quickly whipped some up in the kitchen to give to the customers. It was at that moment that the Chick-fil-A sauce in its earliest form was born. The sauce's popularity only grew when barbecue sauce was accidentally mixed into the batch, giving it the smokey and sweet texture that it is so famous for.
Compare this to the Redditor's recipe detailed in The Sun: Both recipes have barbecue sauce and mustard as part of the ingredient list, although coleslaw dressing isn't mentioned anywhere in Fleming's recipe. While other recipes on CopyKat and The Recipe Critic call for lemon juice, honey, and even mayonnaise, coleslaw dressing is not mentioned. There's no concrete way to prove the Reddit user wrong, save for getting the exact recipe from Chick-fil-A themselves. For all we know, it could be the very recipe made all those years ago by Hugh Fleming.