Buffalo Sauce substitute

Best substitute

Cayenne Hot Sauce + Melted Butter

½ cup hot sauce + ⅓ cup melted butter makes about ¾ cup buffalo sauce

Best for chicken wings

Close match

Whisk 1/2 cup cayenne hot sauce such as Frank's RedHot with 1/3 cup melted butter and you have made real buffalo sauce - that is the whole recipe. No cayenne hot sauce? Use any vinegar-based hot sauce with butter, or thin sriracha with butter and a splash of vinegar. Plain hot sauce alone is not a substitute: without the butter it will not coat wings and it tastes twice as hot.

Other buffalo sauce substitutes

Ranked, with the exact amount to use

2Any Vinegar-Based Hot Sauce + Butter
Close match
3 parts hot sauce + 2 parts melted butter
Tabasco, Crystal, Louisiana-style sauces and most supermarket own-brands all work the same way once butter goes in.
What changes
Best for
wings, dips, roasted vegetables, eggs and breakfast dishes
Tabasco is hotter and much more vinegar-forward than Frank's, so use a quarter less of it and expect a sharper, thinner sauce with more of a bite at the back. A pinch of sugar or a squeeze of honey rounds off the extra acidity. Whatever you use, taste before you toss the wings - hot sauces vary enormously in heat.
3Sriracha + Butter + Vinegar
Taste and texture differ
⅓ cup sriracha + ¼ cup melted butter + 1 tablespoon white vinegar
A workable rebuild when sriracha is the only hot sauce in the house, with vinegar added to undo sriracha's sweetness.
What changes
Best for
wings, cauliflower, fried chicken sandwiches, noodles and rice bowls
Sriracha is sweeter, thicker and much more garlicky than cayenne sauce, so the finished sauce tastes distinctly of garlic and sugar and clings more heavily. The vinegar is not optional - without it the sauce tastes like sweet chilli glaze rather than buffalo. Good, just recognisably not the classic.
4Cayenne Pepper + Vinegar + Butter (From Scratch, No Hot Sauce)
Different texture
½ cup white vinegar + 2 teaspoons cayenne pepper + ½ teaspoon garlic powder + ½ teaspoon salt + ⅓ cup butter, simmered briefly
Builds the sauce from spices when there is no bottled hot sauce at all, and gets genuinely close because those are essentially the ingredients on the bottle.
What changes
Best for
wings, dips, any buffalo recipe
Simmer the vinegar, cayenne, garlic powder and salt for two minutes to take the raw edge off the spice, then whisk in the butter off the heat. It will be slightly grainier than a bottled sauce, which is smooth from being blended and aged. Start with less cayenne than you think - two teaspoons is already medium-hot, and you can add more.
5Gochujang + Butter + Vinegar
Taste and texture differ
2 tablespoons gochujang + 3 tablespoons melted butter + 2 tablespoons vinegar + 2 tablespoons water
A deliberate detour rather than a copy, and a good one when you want a glossy spicy wing sauce and have a Korean pantry.
What changes
Best for
wings, fried chicken, roasted cauliflower, burgers
Deeply savoury, fermented and slightly sweet, so the wings taste rich and Korean rather than sharp and American - closer to a Korean fried chicken glaze than to buffalo. It is much thicker, so thin it with water until it pours, and it browns fast under a broiler because of the sugar.
6Hot Sauce Alone
Taste and texture differ
Use about half as much as the buffalo sauce called for
Listed so you know why it disappoints: it is the acid and heat without the fat, which is the actual point of buffalo sauce.
What changes
Best for
adding heat to soups and dips, when the sauce is stirred into something rich already
Without butter it will not cling to a wing - it runs straight off and pools in the bottom of the bowl - and it tastes roughly twice as hot and much more sour. It is fine when you are stirring it into something that already contains fat, like buffalo chicken dip made with cream cheese. For anything you toss or drizzle, add butter.

What is Buffalo Sauce?

Buffalo Sauce is Buffalo sauce, also sold as buffalo wing sauce, is a cayenne-pepper hot sauce emulsified with melted butter, which is what makes it clingy, tangy and only moderately hot rather than fiery like the hot sauce it starts from.

Cooking tips

The butter is doing three jobs: it dilutes the heat so you can eat a whole plate, it carries the sauce so it coats rather than runs, and it dulls the vinegar's edge. That is why butter is the one thing you should not skip when improvising, and why swapping in more hot sauce does not fix a thin sauce.
Toss wings in the sauce the moment they come out of the oven or fryer, in a big bowl, not on the tray. Hot skin absorbs a little and the rest coats evenly; wings that have cooled first end up with sauce sliding off them.
Sauce the wings at the very end, never before or during cooking. The vinegar and butter stop the skin from crisping, so anything sauced early comes out soggy no matter how hot the oven was.
The heat is fully adjustable through the butter ratio. Roughly equal parts hot sauce and butter gives a mild sauce most people can eat happily; three parts sauce to one part butter is properly hot. Write down what you liked, because the difference between mild and painful is one tablespoon.
If the sauce separates into an oily layer and a red layer, it has broken. Whisk in a teaspoon of cold water or a small knob of cold butter off the heat and it will come back together. Keeping it below a simmer prevents it in the first place.

Frequently asked questions

Is buffalo sauce just hot sauce?

No, and this is the thing most people get wrong. Buffalo sauce is cayenne hot sauce blended with melted butter, roughly three parts sauce to two parts butter. The butter is what makes it thick enough to coat a wing, milder than the bottle it came from, and rich rather than purely sharp. Using plain hot sauce where a recipe wants buffalo sauce gives you something noticeably hotter, thinner and more sour.

Can I just leave it out?

Only if you replace it with something else that coats. Buffalo sauce is usually the entire flavour of the dish, so leaving it off wings or cauliflower leaves you with plain baked chicken or plain vegetables. If you have no hot sauce at all, a mixture of melted butter, vinegar, garlic powder, smoked paprika and a little cayenne gets you most of the way there, and a barbecue-style glaze is a perfectly good different dish.

What can I use instead of butter in buffalo sauce?

A vegan block-style butter is the closest and behaves almost identically. Refined coconut oil works and stays glossy, though it firms up as it cools. Olive oil works for flavour but separates readily, so whisk hard and serve straight away. A tablespoon of mayonnaise whisked in will hold an emulsion very reliably, which sounds odd and tastes fine.

How do I make buffalo sauce less hot?

Add more butter first - that is the built-in dial, and going from three parts sauce to two parts butter up to equal parts drops the heat a lot without changing the flavour. A tablespoon of honey or a spoonful of ketchup takes another edge off. Serving it with blue cheese or ranch on the side is not just tradition; the dairy genuinely cools the capsaicin.

How long does homemade buffalo sauce keep?

About two weeks in a sealed jar in the fridge, since it is mostly vinegar and butter. It will solidify when cold, so warm it gently and whisk before using. Do not leave it out at room temperature for long stretches, and if it smells off or looks curdled after warming and whisking, make a fresh batch - it takes two minutes.

Related substitutes

More sauces & condiments substitutes

Buffalo Sauce substitute

Other buffalo sauce substitutes

2Any Vinegar-Based Hot Sauce + Butter

3Sriracha + Butter + Vinegar

4Cayenne Pepper + Vinegar + Butter (From Scratch, No Hot Sauce)

5Gochujang + Butter + Vinegar

6Hot Sauce Alone