The Great Chicken Wing Hunt

Lost entry from September 2009 - Matt gets married, bumps into wing hunter

Lucie and I got hitched! August 23, in my hometown, Lyons, NY. Watch a film about how I proposed under 'clips'.

We've since moved to NYC, where I'm working on a master's degree in documentary film.

In other news, I bumped into NYC day hunter Kevin Connors last week at the National Wing fest in Buffalo. I roped him into performing in a Matt-bumps-into Kevin scene, played as though it were last year, for use in tying together a sequence from 2007. Kevin asked me how I felt now that the hunt was over, and I said was both happy and relieved, but that I was worried that Thor was too tired to finish the trip.

Kevin was a good sport. But he had a hard time remembering to pretend it was 2007. We have a lot of footage from the hunt that we need to make gel with re-enactments. Figuring out what to shoot, and when and how to shoot it, is a slow, painstaking process. Finding time and money to shoot is also hard. But team wing hunt perseveres.

By the way, hats off to Kevin for traveling from New Jersey to Buffalo every year for the wing fest. I'd love to hear from other NYC wing hunters. Please email me at matt@chickenwinghunt.com.

Excerpt from wing hunt up for PBS award - VOTE NOW

An excerpt from the Wing Hunt -- A Brief History of the Buffalo Wing -- has been chosen as a finalist in PBS's reel 13 shorts competition. Voting is open to the public and the three contenders can be seen here

http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/category/vote/

Please vote for the wing short if you think it's the best. Please abstain if you like another film better. Just kidding. But not really. The winner will be broadcast on channel 13 in NYC on Saturday. Winning would a shot in the arm for team wing hunt and useful publicity as we try to raise money to finish the big kahuna.

 

Grady to bottle and sell sauce

I bumped into chef Marshall Grady. He said his wing sauce, which took top prize during the hunt, is going to be bottled and sold in central New York stores starting this summer.

While we were chatting two strangers came up and asked him for autographs.

In other news, we recorded part of the film's soundtrack last month. Here's my favorite track. It's a ballad about a train wreck by Al Caster called Old_97.

 

Hunter blames gall stones on wings

Man down! 

Hunter Ron Wieszczyk is recovering from emergency gall
bladder surgery. 

Gall stones inside Ron were solid cholesterol. Ron blames
the hunt (see email below). In other news, our trailer 
made it over the 10,000-views hump and the U.S. government
awarded a visa to my fiancee and Czech wing hunter Lucie
Mayerova. She arrives July 30 and we're getting
married on August 23. 

Email from Ron:

Fellow wing hunters, we have had a casualty which I
attribute to the Great 2007 Chicken Wing Hunt.
 
Had my gall bladder taken out last Monday (3/31/08) due 
to a large number of Gall Stones. Tests confirmed they 
were almost 100% cholesterol! I think there was one stone
for every wing I ate. Was pretty much an emergency surgery.
I went in early Monday morning and was home by noon the 
next day.
 
I'm doing fine and just got back to work today. What fun.
The low fat diet has begun. Good thing beer is low fat.
 
Cheers!


 
 
 

Friends of the hunt in the media

Associate Producer (and road-rally champ) Alex Roy on Dave Letterman.

Associate Producer Drew "Wing King" Cerza on The View.

Chef Armand, author of Wings Across America, writes in Dish duJour magazine about the National Buffalo Wing Festival, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Innovation or Abomination?

Once wings were sold in buckets. Then wingmakers switched to styrofoam clam-shell cartons. And to tins.

That was the extent of innovation I had seen in 25 years of eating wings.

Then I went to the national wing festival and found a number of devices designed to make eating wings easier. My favorite was the Snackdaddy, a round serving dish that looks like a Michigan rummy tray. Compartments for holding wings ring the perimeter (like penny compartments in a rummy tray). A compartment in the center holds the blue cheese dressing (like the kitty in a rummy tray).

(The Snackdaddy has a fatal flaw, in my opinion: it brings the wing AWAY from the eater, towards the blue cheese (meaning the eater has to bring the wing the same distance back again to his/her mouth). The better design would be having the wings in the center and the dressing in the outer ring.)

What to make of the latest wing invention, the trong? http://www.trongs.com/. The trong is a staple-remover-shaped device that allows you to grab (and eat) wings without getting your hands saucey.

It's impressive that a couple of wing-eaters extrapolated from a drunken conversation to what appears to be a semi-viable business. It shows commitment bordering on fanaticism. I also appreciate the trongs transformer-like design.

However, I see two serious problems: 1. cleaning a wing is not easy; it requires the dexterity of one's fingers (in direct contact with the wing) 2. people ENJOY eating wings with their hands. That's part of the wing's charm. Just as few people want to eat pizza with a fork, and no one wants to eat popcorn with a spoon, I don't think many people will want to use the throng. (I have to admit I kind of want to try it, but not enough to order one).

Wing-dispensing innovations are like new wing sauces. Forty years ago butchers threw wings away. Now you can get them in a 100 flavors and eat them without getting your fingers dirty. But what does it amount to? Does a honey-mustard wing taste better than a classic Buffalo wing? No way.

Editing is worse for you than wing-hunting

Apologies for a recent lack of news. I am holed up in upstate New York editing. (So far I've logged 170 hours of tape and put together a rough cut of 1/5 of it.)

Oddly enough, I've noticed that editing a wing-hunting film is worse for one's health than wing-hunting. I consumed 3,000 wing calories a day on the hunt. I burned off most of these calories hunting, driving and rallying the troops from early morning to past midnight. I gained just five pounds in 16 days, 5-10 pounds less than estimated. More unexpected than a lack of weight gain was that I was alert and energetic for most of the trip.

Now I sit in an office chair, working at a computer and eating wings a mere 1-2 times a week. I haven't gained weight. But I haven't lost any either. And no matter how often I drag myself out jogging, I cannot seem to shake off a bone-deep sluggishness that has set in.

I think the lesson is that it is better to eat wings and be active than to sit on one's ass in front of a computer monitor or TV eating vegetables and dip and drinking tea.

On a personal note, I recently postponed my wedding to wing hunter Lucie Mayerova, from July 5 to an indefinite date sometime in August or September.  The U.S. government takes longer to process fiancee visas than we expected.

Producer Alex Roy breaks trans-continental driving record

Congratulations to associate producer Alexander Roy, who announced this week he set the non-stop driving LA-New York speed record with a time of 31 hours and four minutes.

Roy, a wing buff, road rally champ and car rental executive, describes his cross-country run in his new book, Driver, released yesterday by Harper Collins.

More on Roy in this NY Times article.

Beer can make wings taste hotter

I was logging footage last night when I came across a startling fact: beer-drinking can actually make wings taste hotter.

This is according to Mark Weiler (www.wyswings.com), whom hunt fans will remember as the wing fanatic that drove from Virginia to cook for us at his brother's house in Rochester.

"Alcohol - if you drink it before you eat - dilates the tissue in your mouth," Mark told one of our cameramen. "You can go to a place and have extra-hot wings one night and go the next night and have a beer or two first - a half a glass even - and the same wings will seem so much hotter."

Mark didn't elaborate. I would guesst that with further alcohol consumption there comes a point when the dulling of the brain's senses outweighs sensory gain experienced in the mouth, and the wings start tasting milder.

I don't know if my wing senses had been heightened or dulled when I tried the hottest sauce of my life, the Defcon zero (www.defconsauces.com), in Brooklyn on August 18. I had certainly had a few drinks. An extract-based sauce with a gazillion Scoville units and not sold to the general public, the Zero is too dangerous (or mabye just too painful) for the human stomach and unfit to be tried on a wing. Defcon's owners took a drop of the Zero from a nail-polish-sized vial and placed it on a straw. I put the straw in my mouth and sucked.

The agony - like a soldering iron to the lips - peaked at minute five and eased after about twelve minutes.

One way to mitigate hot sauce burn, I learned that night, is to suck on sugar. Another option is eating ice cream. And not for the temperature drop, Mark says. Dairy products have an enzyme that combats the burn of Capsaicin (the molecule that makes peppers hot).

"The dairy enzyme casene cools heat - so anything with dairy in it will help," Mark says. "A lot of people try bread, water, soda, but they don't do much."

Reynold's and Ric's winning hot sauce

I spoke to a company today about bottling a hot sauce developed by me and wing hunter Ric Kealoha.

The sauce's claims to fame are it 1. introduced a thousand Slavs to the joys of Buffalo wings and 2. won top prize at the 2007 National Buffalo Wing festival, an awkward footnote in the history of the Great Chicken Wing Hunt. Ric and I and five other hunters came to Buffalo to search for the world's best Buffalo wing. Not stake our own claim to the title. "We've been chasing our tail," declared hunter Ron Wieszczyk as Ric and I hoisted the silver trophy on stage.

Of course our sauce was declared ineligible for the hunt's top prize. We'll never know how Ric and I would have fared. Perhaps someday an enterprising young upstate New Yorker will repeat the hunt, and, finding me on a rocker chair in the Adirondacks surrounded by a garden of peppers, will taste my sauce and evaluate it for posterity.

In any case, it's gratifying to know our sauce may soon face an even tougher judge -- the marketplace and the invisible hand of millions of wing eaters.