Buffalo Chicken Finger Sub

A finger is a long narrow strip of breast, breaded and fried on every side, and a Buffalo finger sub is built around laying three or four of those strips end-to-end down a sub roll. The geometry of the row carries the build. A flat boneless fillet gives the sauce a single broad face to coat and a single edge to drip from. A row of fingers gives twice the crust area, four narrow channels of sauce between the strips, and a bite that always finds at least one length of fried surface coated in the lacquer that ran into the seam. The cut is the engineering.

The sauce is the same cayenne-and-butter emulsion the city built its wing on. Frank's RedHot is whisked with melted unsalted butter until the fat carries the heat into a thin glossy slick that clings rather than runs. That emulsion does not flavor the chicken from the inside; it lacquers the crust from the outside, which is why the fingers are tossed in the sauce in a metal bowl after they come out of the fryer rather than basted on the way through. The Buffalo grammar is set there: surface heat, not seasoned heat, applied at the end. The butter is the part that turns a hot sauce into a coating thick enough to stay on the strip and also the part that does the most damage to the roll.

The build is engineered against that damage. A Buffalo-style sub roll is baked with a structural top crust and a soft slightly chewy crumb sized to hold a wet load for the time it takes to eat one. A thick stripe of blue cheese dressing goes on the cut face of the roll before the chicken touches it, working as a moisture barrier between the buttery emulsion and the bread. Iceberg goes on as a cold fibrous deck under the strips so the hot dripping fingers do not touch the dressing directly until they need to. The standing local variant is ranch in place of blue cheese, which Buffalo eaters will tell you is not the right answer and is also what they order half the time at home.

The build fails in two places. A sub left in the foil while the customer drives home turns the crust to a soft slick within ten minutes and the bread to a wet pad shortly after; the fix is to eat it standing at the shop counter or to ride with the foil cracked open so the steam can escape. A weak fry, where the breading is undersalted or the oil cool, leaves a coating that swells with sauce and disintegrates on contact with the lettuce; the fix is to call ahead so the order is dropped fresh, and the regulars know to do it. A bun-format Buffalo chicken sandwich solves both by being shorter and rounder, which is why it exists. The finger-and-sub format gives up the convenience to get the row-of-crusts.

Western New York reads the order grammar in three calls. Spicy or honey is the first, which is the sauce: Buffalo, suicide, or a sweet honey-mustard version a kitchen will make for someone who came in with friends. Blue cheese or ranch is the second. Loaded or plain is the third, loaded meaning lettuce and tomato added on. A foot-long finger sub from a pizzeria in Buffalo, eaten with a side of bleu cheese in a styrofoam cup at a bar TV on a Sunday afternoon, is the dish's actual context and not Wing Wednesday at a national chain three states over.

The variants stay close to the strip. A buffalo chicken wrap takes the same fingers and the same sauce and runs them in a flour tortilla; a fingers-and-fries platter pulls the strips out of the sub and onto a plate with the sauce as a dip. The Bocce Club sauce is a sweeter, garlic-leaning regional sub-genre stocked at the Bailey Avenue pizzeria of the same name. The wing on which all of this is built and the bun-format Buffalo chicken sandwich it shares a kitchen with are written up separately on the site.

Origin and history

The Buffalo wing was first made by Teressa Bellissimo at the Anchor Bar at 1047 Main Street, Buffalo, New York on 4 March 1964, when she deep-fried a tray of chicken wings that had come in by mistake on a meat order and dressed them with a hot sauce. The wing went city-wide through the late 1960s and 1970s and national by the early 1980s with the founding of Buffalo Wild Wings in 1982 and Hooters in 1983. The chicken finger sub came out of the same Western New York kitchens about two decades after the wing, the strip-cut version of the same fillet handled the same way.

The sub format is hard to pin to a single shop. The most common credit goes to Gene Mongan at John's Pizza and Subs in Tonawanda, who in the early 1980s began putting the sauced tenders customers kept ordering onto sub rolls, though Jim's Steakout claims the sandwich from the same years. La Nova Pizzeria on West Ferry and other pizzerias in the city ran parallel finger-sub builds in the same years; there is no documented single inventor, only a regional shift through the pizzerias in the 1980s.

By the late 2010s the chicken finger sub was a default Buffalo carryout item, on the menu of every pizzeria in the metropolitan area and only occasionally outside it. The Anchor Bar on Main Street still serves the original wing and added the sub to its own carryout menu; Bocce Club still sells the sub with its house sauce from its Bailey Avenue counter.