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Saturday, February 8, 2014

The day buffalo sauce came to Sweden

It was a Tuesday morning. We were on our way to the office and I needed to stop in the grocery store to pick up some food for later. We walked in, and there, glimmering before our eyes, was a giant display featuring buffalo flavored items. There was no hesitation in grabbing a bottle of the straight buffalo sauce. We lingered for a few more moments, taking in all the buffalo items to be had, but we had what we needed.

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Allow me to get slightly off track with a little story here. My dad and stepmom came to visit in the autumn of 2012, and the items we requested they bring for us that we had not found in Sweden were slippers and Frank's Red Hot. I've seen slippers since then, but for some reason autumn of 2012 produced no slippers for me in Sweden. Well, they delivered, and let me just tell you that we have still not run out of Frank's Red Hot. However! We are now on our last bottle, and it is getting to the end. So pretty much this is the perfect time for Sweden to magically give us buffalo sauce.

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I can't say I would have called buffalo sauce Tex-Mex, but that won't stop me from buying this stuff. The American West… Buffalo, NY… it is basically all the same, right?

Of course, I didn't want to be biased in my opinion of this buffalo sauce, so I suggested to Greg that we do some taste testing. The plan was to do two tests. First was the triangle test, where you have three samples, two of one type and one of the other, and you simply have to say which two are the same. This is not always as easy as people assume. For our test we tasted our samples on a piece of cheese.

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I set up the test for Greg and not only did he know which two were the same, he also knew that he had two buffalos and one red hot. Greg then set it up for me, and I was able to tell which two were the same, but I could not say which was which. We both agreed that if we had been comparing the new stuff to Frank's Buffalo Sauce that we would not have been able to tell the difference. (This is really impressive, considering we once found a box of mac & cheese here, so we bought it, but could not even finish it because it was really disgusting (and I am not one who is too picky about foods with cheese.))

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As for which sauce got our votes as the overall best? I chose Frank's Red Hot and Greg chose the Buffalo Sauce. Although I think we would both rate both sauces very highly. And now it is time for us to head back to that store and buy more before it disappears!

2 comments:

  1. Congratulations on an important find! Is your Tex Mex Buffalo Sauce actually from Buffalo? Thank you for explaining the taste test. I will probably use your triangle test method in the future.

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    1. Thank you! I have no idea where it is from. I think it only says "made in USA" without further specification. The company seems to be based in Stockholm.

      The triangle test is a thing I learned about from Brian Sullivan long ago, but I think this is the first time I've employed it.

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